Hello! If you would like to be added to my permanent taglist moving forwards, please comment on this post specifying if you want to be tagged for all stories or for specific characters. Max of 50 🥰
This won’t affect taglists for current stories. If you’re already on those, and don’t reply here before I hit 50, you’ll stay on them 🥰
I hope I’m doing this right. Still so much about tumblr that baffles me 😂
Joel Miller Masterlist
Pedro Pascal Masterlist
Henry Castillo Masterlist
Javier Pena Masterlist
Frankie Morales Masterlist
Din Djarin Masterlist
Could that picture of Din mean I have a Mandalorian story in the works?? 🫣
Thank you for the tag @din-cognito! This was a tough one!
How it works: Pick a favourite passage from your work for each category below. It can be a line or a few paragraphs.
Your most Romantic (or sweetest)
- Hair Trigger, Part Fourteen:
It isn’t far. The distance between you is inches, not miles, but you feel each one. The tip of his nose brushes the side of yours and skates, his exhale hitting the corner of your mouth and going cold as it leaves him, warming as it lands.
You close your eyes because there isn’t a better thing to do with them.
His mouth reaches yours with the kind of certainty that comes from thinking about it too long. The first press is cautious, as if he’s verifying a measurement he wants right. The second settles, warmer, surer. He isn’t holding your face or pulling you in – not being possessive or demanding. He’s making enough contact to say that he wants this – just this for now – without asking for anything his hands don’t already have.
Your Angst-iest writing (I had to pick two)
- The Devil’s Smile, Part Forty:
"I can't." The words come out as a sob. "I can't let you touch me. Every time someone touches me, I feel him, I feel David's hands on me and I can't…even the girls, when they hug me, or when they climbed into bed beside me last night, I have to force myself not to flinch and I can't do that to you, can't make you touch someone who's this broken…"
- Sweet Poison, Part Sixteen:
His movements become more rhythmic, increasing in speed and pleasure, his cock thumping continuously against the back of your throat. You can feel the tears rolling down your cheeks now, but he clearly doesn’t care. He just keeps looking at you, like you’re nothing, like this is what women like you are for. Maybe your upset is even a turn on for him.
“That’s it…” he groans appreciatively. “Yeah, you deep throat me, bitch. Mike was right about you. You know you love this, you dirty fucking whore. You’re gonna take everything I got…that’s it…we’re gonna use you up, and when you’re done, you’ll just be Jackson’s whore. Nobody’s gonna wanna look at you again.”
“Especially not Miller,” someone unseen jokes from behind you.
Your most Humorous
- The Christmas You Get You Deserve:
The Santa hat waited on a stool, its white pom-pom mocking him with its cheer. Tommy stripped off the last of his layers with a whoop, posing like a pin-up from a holiday catalogue, his laughter drawing chuckles from the crew. Joel followed suit, slower, the cool air raising gooseflesh on his exposed torso as he tugged the trunks on - red, festive, ridiculous. The hat settled on his head like a crown he never wanted, the elastic tugging at his ears.
Your Sexiest
- Through The Wall, Part Two:
You work the codpiece loose first. There are clasps along the underside, hidden, fiddly things, and you take your time finding them, letting your knuckles drag deliberately against the swell already firming up beneath the plate. He inhales sharply and the vocoder catches it, distorting it so that it sounds like a low electronic rasp. You hum approvingly and finally get the last clasp free, lifting the codpiece off and setting it down on the deck beside you with a soft, careful clink of metal on metal.
The dark fabric beneath is obviously, undeniably tented. You let yourself look for a long moment, savouring it – the shape of him straining against the cloth, the small dark spot where he's already started to leak through. Then you raise your eyes back up to the visor and give him your sweetest smile.
Look at you," you breathe. "All this control and you're already this hard for me."
Hi! Random thought, but for some reason Sting’s Fields of Gold reminds me Where our shadows meet, I don’t know why, it just gives me the same feeling.
Also I wanted to ask, no pressure, but when do you think we’ll get the next chapter? I’m really excited!!
Summary: You, Joel and Sarah are spending the day at a waterpark. She wants her dad to go on a slide with her. You just want her dad.
Warnings: 18+only for smut 😛
A/N: Written on a phone and inspired by a day at a waterpark (although sadly no Joel and no cabana lovin’) 😂
Joel Masterlist
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The slide is called the Viper.
The sign at the base features a cartoon snake and a near-vertical drop, and the line coils through three switchbacks before disappearing around a concrete wall painted to look like a jungle.
Sarah has read the statistics off the sign twice, out loud, and is currently chewing the skin of her thumbnail in a way you know as her pre-courage ritual.
"It's literally almost straight down," she says, not really to you, rather more to the universe, as though negotiating terms.
"Yep."
"Thirty miles per hour. The sign says thirty miles per hour."
Two men in neon yellow go screaming over the lip of the drop on an inflatable, vanish, then reappear as a distant splash and a whoop. Sarah watches this with the expression of someone reconsidering a life decision.
"I think," you say carefully, "that this one has your dad's name on it."
The relief that moves across her face is immediate and total and you don’t even feel offended because fuck that.
“Yeah, he'd love this. He's always saying he likes stuff like this."
Joel has expressed no such thing in your presence, ever. You know his water-park priorities down to the geometry of where he sits to catch the most shade and where the nearest water fountain is.
But you say none of this.
"I'll go get him. Hold our spot."
She nods as you slip away from her, heat coiling low in your belly that has nothing to do with the fierce Texas sun and everything to do with pure, unadulterated want.
You've been watching him all day.
That's the honest version of how you got here - not Sarah needs her dad, though she does, but also the accumulated weight of six hours in the sun watching Joel Miller exist in board shorts and not nearly enough shirt.
The way his back looks when he reaches up to adjust the curtains around the rented cabana. The specific flex of his forearms when he carries three bottles of water and a tray of food from the concession stand without asking for help. The smattering of dark hair tracing down from his naval and catching the light. The scar along his ribs that you know the feel of in the dark. The way his hand spread across the small of your back this morning when you were paying for parking, automatic, not for anyone's benefit, just there - proprietary and easy all at once.
You've been wanting his hands on you since approximately nine this morning when you pulled up outside his house and it's now past four.
The cabana curtain is half-drawn. Through the gap you see him in pieces - bare feet, one heel dropped off the lounger, the long stretch of his legs, the faded board shorts, the knot of the drawstring - then all of him, arms folded back behind his head, pulling the muscles of his chest and shoulders into long, clean lines, chest slick with a mix of sunscreen and sweat, jaw loose with sleep, sunglasses half-slid down his nose.
You stand there for a moment that you don't justify to yourself.
He is genuinely, stupidly beautiful and he has no idea, or pretends not to, and the combination of those things has been a problem for you since the first time you saw him at the auto shop eighteen months ago.
You step inside and pull the curtain closed, muffling the noise of the park.
"Joel."
“Mm.”
"Joel." You crouch beside the lounger and lay your hand on his forearm, skin sun-hot to the touch. "Wake up."
He makes a low sound in his chest, and one hand drops and finds yours without a single second of conscious effort.
His palm is rough, warm and large and it swallows the back of your hand entirely. The ache that's been sitting at the base of your spine all day sharpens itself into something with an edge.
"Sarah wants you for a slide," you say, keeping your voice completely reasonable.
"Mm,” he murmurs again.
"Big one. Scary. She wants her dad."
One eye opens and finds you, blurry with sleep, and his expression does that soft private thing it does when you're the first face he processes.
His thumb moves slowly across your knuckles, back and forth.
"Tell her I died," he says.
"Joel."
"I'm serious. Tell her it was peaceful."
You push his sunglasses back up with your free hand, and he catches your wrist - not tight, just certain, the way he holds things he means to keep. Both eyes open all the way, and he looks at you the way he's been looking at you all day in a lower register, the same look made louder now that you're close and it's just the two of you behind a canvas curtain.
His gaze drops.
You're in a multi coloured bikini that ties at both hips, the one you bought knowing what it would do to him. He looks at you the way he always does - a single thorough pass that starts at your face and doesn't rush anywhere, takes in the curve of your shoulders, the neckline, the flare of your hips, the ties at either side - and then comes back to your mouth, his jaw tightening faintly.
"Come here," he says in a tone that indicates it’s not a request.
You lean in and he meets you halfway, his hand at your wrist guiding you in. Then his mouth is on yours and he tastes like the Coke he finished an hour ago and sleep and him.
His other hand comes off the back of his head and finds your face, his thumb against your cheekbone tilting you where he wants you. He kisses you like he's been waiting, slow and deliberate, taking his time with your bottom lip in a way that makes your toes curl into the warm concrete.
"We have maybe ten minutes," you say into his mouth.
"We have twenty. You know what these lines are like.”
He's already sitting up, and suddenly you're inside the bracket of him, his knees on either side of yours, his hands dropping from your face to your hips. He squeezes once, both hands, his fingers digging into the soft flesh there with a low, satisfied sound that goes directly to the base of your spine.
“God, I've been thinkin’ about this all damn day."
"You've been thinking…”
"You've been walkin’ around in this thing since this mornin’. Tits swayin’, ass jigglin’…fuck I love your ass.”
His hands move to curve around the swell of your ass, fingers kneading gently, then they slide back up your sides, thumbing over your ribs, tracing the line of the bikini’s edge up to where it sits snugly under your breasts.
“Near drove me outta my mind."
"You’ve been too busy organising stuff, and sleeping, to notice,” you reply with a faux pout.
"I saw you, baby."
His mouth finds the side of your neck and you tilt your head back and just let it happen, your fingers curling into the hair at the back of his head.
He drags his lips along the column of your throat, open-mouthed, and you feel the scrape of his stubble on sensitive skin and shiver. His hands are moving - palming up over your hips, his thumbs tracing the hollows at the fronts of them, appreciating you with his hands the way he always does, like he's cataloguing.
“You're so goddamn…” he starts, low, against your throat.
"Don't," you say, because when he does this, talks low in your ear about what you do to him, you completely lose the ability to be a functional person.
He makes a low, amused sound and works the tie at your left hip loose. The knot at your right follows, unhurried, the material tossed to one side, and then his hands are on bare skin. He makes a sound that is not amusement anymore - rough, involuntary - as his palms curve over you. He pulls back to look at you in the stripped-down way he has when it's just the two of you, no pretense in it, just want laid plain on his face.
"Lie back," he says.
“Joel…” you say warningly, even though you’re already doing exactly as he’s asked.
He comes with you, one forearm bracing beside your head, the other hand spanning across your stomach. He's looking down at you like he always does - taking his time, reading you - and his hand is warm and large against your belly, and you feel the muscle there jump under his touch.
"Joel," you say again, this time not meaning it as anything except his name.
"I got you." He drops his head and drags his mouth from your throat, over your collarbone, nosing the straps of your bikini top aside one after the other before finally taking the fabrics between his teeth and pulling it down hard, making you gasp. The wet heat of his mouth closing over one hardened nipple causes you to arch up into him with a groan you swallow fast.
His hand slides slow down your stomach, over the jut of your hip, fingers curving inward. You’re already wound tight from the day and the accumulated want and the specific knowledge of his hands, and when he finally touches you where you need it most you make a sound that isn’t quiet enough and have to bury it in the meat of his shoulder.
Outside, a speaker plays something loud and bass-heavy. Children shriek as they run past, the water park absolutely continuing to exist whilst your boyfriend prepares to fuck you.
And you couldn’t give a damn.
Joel doesn't rush. He never rushes this part, which is its own particular torture - those thick fingers reading you with complete attention, learning what makes your breath hitch, pressing precisely where it makes your hips roll up. You feel heat building in long, deep waves and you press your face into his shoulder as your fingers dig into his back.
"You're so wet," he says near your ear, rough and quiet, and you want to die a little. "That water from the slides baby, or…?”
“What do you think?” You breathe, not waiting for the rest. "All day, Joel…” His fingers curl and you have to clamp a hand over your own mouth.
“All day what?”
“All day I’ve been thinking about this,” you confess.
“Really? Fuckin’ in a cabana with little old me?” He teases pushing one digit then another through your slick folds and into your heat.
“Fuck!” You gasp. “Oh my God…”
“Joel’ll do.”
You snicker a laugh that quickly becomes a moan.
“Asshole.”
“Mm…let’s keep your asshole for an occasion when we got more time,” he murmurs into the skin of your throat and your whole body shakes.
He works you apart with his hand until your thighs are trembling, your free hand fisted in the lounger cushion, his name a broken thing you keep pressing into his shoulder every time the sound tries to get away from you.
He watches your face through it with that focused, dark-eyed attention fixed on you like there's nothing else worth looking at in the world. Like you’re the most interesting thing that has ever happened in his life.
When you finally breathe out his name as a please he gets his shorts dealt with, and you reach down to feel the full, hard length of him, tip already oozing.
“Eager, Mr Miller?”
“Fuck,” he hisses in response. “Don’t tease me like that baby.”
“Like what?” You purr, stroking him firmly, thumb sweeping over his precum.
“Goddamn devil,” he growls, mouth covering yours, tongue sweeping inside and meeting your own.
Without further preamble, you hook your ankle behind his thigh and pull him in.
The moment he pushes into you, you both stop.
The stretch of him, the heat, the fullness…your whole body sighs around him. His jaw tightens, his eyes closing for a moment, and then he opens them and looks at you.
"Christ," he says, very quietly, like it's not meant for you.
"Move," you tell him.
He rolls his hips in a long, slow pull that makes your back bow, and the sound you make is absolutely not quiet, no possible way to make it quiet, and you have to turn your face hard into his shoulder and bite down.
“You feel so good, baby, so perfect. Like this pussy was just made for me.”
“Maybe it was,” you whisper. “No man’s cock makes me feel like yours does.”
He groans against your temple, low and controlled, and his pace builds from the slow deliberate warmup into something that is using his whole body - his hips snapping, the lounger rocking faintly, one of his hands gripping your waist and the other braced by your head, slick bodies sliding against one another.
You can feel every inch of him. You've wanted every inch of him since his hand was on the small of your back in the parking lot this morning and here you are with his body driving the breath out of you in a water park cabana while his daughter is nervously waiting in a slide queue.
“You like that, baby?” He mutters. “You like feelin’ my cock inside you?”
“Yes,” you whimper, ‘yes, Joel, yes…”
He palms over your breast, his thumb dragging across the nipple, and you dig your nails into his shoulder.
"Right there," you breathe, because your hips have taken on a direction of their own, angling up to take more of him, desperate and shameless. "Don't…don't stop…”
"Wasn't gonna."
His hand slides down your side, over the flare of your hip, then he squeezes again and you feel his pace stutter, like he physically can't help himself, like the curve of you in his palm short-circuits something.
"You have no idea," he starts, rough and half-finished, and his hand finds where your bodies join, his thumb pressing your clit in exactly the right place, and that's the end of your ability to track any conversation.
You come in a wave that starts low and breaks hard, and what comes out of you is almost nothing - a sharp, swallowed exhale, his name losing all its syllables, your whole body clenching around him and your fingers leaving marks in his shoulder.
He fucks you through it without mercy, reading you with his hands and his eyes and his body, and when the pleasure finally crests and rolls you feel entirely wrung out and still wanting more.
He chases it a minute later, his rhythm going deep and uneven, his face buried in the curve of your neck, a harsh breath of your name against your skin.
“You want me inside, baby?” He groans. “Want me to fill you up? Want me so deep?”
“Yes,” you beg, “please Joel,” because you haven’t failed to notice all the cute little kids in their bathing suits and hats, splashing in the shallow waters of the park, nor failed to consider what it might be like to have one of your own with his eyes and mop of dark hair.
“Fuck…” he grunts, then he shudders once, full-body, and the weight of him settles on you like something solid and right as he floods you.
Neither of you moves for a moment as his cock twitches, pushing the last remnants of him deeper.
Outside, the speaker switches songs and a child screams in total delight.
Joel lifts his head and looks at you. His eyes are still dark, still warm, and he brushes your hair back from your face with his thumb like it's the obvious next thing to do with his hand.
He looks at you for a long, quiet moment as you both begin to breathe steadily again, and you see the settled thing in him - the specific stillness that comes over him sometimes when he has your face in front of him, like this is where things make sense.
"Okay," he says.
"Okay," you agree.
He pulls out, the loss of him making you whimper, and sits up. Ever the gentleman, he reaches for your bag and pulls out a pack of baby wipes, carefully running one over your swollen centre and the inside of your thighs before sweeping it over his wilting cock.
Then he retrieves your bikini briefs and reties both hip knots with careful, practiced hands, smoothing the fabric back into place, and helping you fix your top. He presses his lips once to the tip of your nose - that small, private Joel Miller period mark, there, good, done - and stands.
You check your phone camera. Your hair is a disaster, but you've been in the sun for five hours so that's entirely explicable. Your lips are swollen and there’s a flush in your cheeks. But it’s hot out so…
Joel pulls up his shorts, runs a hand back through his own hair, finds his sunglasses, and somehow looks composed except for the colour across his throat and the way his eyes are still dark when they find yours.
"Ready?" you say.
"Mm." He rolls his shoulders, clears his throat and becomes a man who was simply napping in a cabana. "She better still be in that line."
"She's fine, Joel."
"I'm just sayin'. Don’t think I ain’t seen the way she’s been lookin’ at some of the boys round here in their shorts, showin’ off their six packs.”
“She’s fourteen.”
“I’m aware.”
He holds the curtain open for you, and his hand drops to the small of your back as you step out into the full light - automatic, easy, there and then not there - and the afternoon hits you both like a wall.
Sarah is five people from the front, and the moment she spots Joel she lights up, that quick unguarded happiness she never quite succeeds in playing cool.
"Finally," she calls.
"Yeah, yeah." He steps into line beside her and she immediately begins presenting the slide's statistics to him with the energy of someone who has had too long alone with their anxiety and is ready to share the burden.
Joel looks up at the near-vertical drop, at the cartoon snake, at the sign that says thirty miles an hour, and his expression goes carefully neutral.
"You wanna do that?”
"Together. It'll be less scary with you."
He looks at the drop then looks at his daughter.
"Fine," he says.
Sarah's face splits open. "Yes…”
"I'm makin' no promises about what noises come out of me."
"You're definitely going to scream.”
"I am not gonna scream babygirl…”
They bicker warmly up the line, Sarah gesturing at the drop with both hands, Joel studying it with the face of a man calculating his dignity against thirty miles per hour. He glances back at you once - quick, a single beat - and there it is. Everything underneath, all of it, warm and dark and not for anyone else.
You lean on the railing with your water bottle and watch them. His hand on her shoulder, loose and automatic, her talking with her whole body at him, him listening like there's nothing worth hearing in the world except this.
Your chest is full of something you've stopped trying to name.
Up above, the Viper drops its near-vertical line against the bright sky. Another pair of strangers take the plunge and emerge from the splash at the bottom howling in triumph.
Summary: You need some time away from Din until a moment of panic leads to reunion.
Warnings: 18+only. I promise the smut will be back!
A/N: Greetings from Portugal! 🇵🇹 Good thing I had this written before going away! Enjoy! 🥰
One/Two/Three/Four/Five/Six/Seven/Eight/Nine/Ten
Din Masterlist
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You hear him before you've gone twenty paces.
The footfalls are unmistakable. Beskar boots on cobble have a sound nothing else in the galaxy quite makes – that dense clink under each step, the weight of a man who’s carrying eight kilos of metal on his torso and not bothering to walk quietly about it.
He’s not running because Din has never run after you. But he’s walking, fast, with the long deliberate stride of a man who knows he’s faster than you are and is choosing, very pointedly, not to close the distance entirely.
"Cyar'ika."
You don't turn and walk faster.
"Cyar'ika…. stop."
You don't stop, because if you do, he’ll catch you and if he catches you he’ll put his hands on your shoulders the way he always does and tip the visor down to your face and say something low and careful through the modulator and you will, like an idiot, like a soft, tired pregnant idiot, fold against him and forgive him for things he hasn’t yet apologised for, and you will not, you’ve decided, do that this morning.
So, you walk faster down the uneven lane, past the woman at the pump, past a small cat that scrambles off a low wall in front of you, past a stack of empty crates and a Rodian unloading a hover-pallet who lifts his head as the both of you go by.
"Cyar'ika, please."
"Don't, Din."
The cobbles get worse. Karga's settlement has grown faster than its road crews can keep up with, and there’s a stretch along the lane where the old volcanic-rock paving meets the newer duracrete patch in a small uneven seam, and you don’t see it.
Your toe catches and your hand flies out to break the fall. The world tips and you hear the small involuntary sound of your own breath punching out of you. Somewhere behind you, the modulator say cyar'ika in a voice you’ve never quite heard out of it before, sharp and high and almost cracked.
A hand catches your elbow – a bare hand, broad and weathered and warm. It hooks under your arm and lifts, and an arm goes round your other side at the waist and steadies you upright.
"Easy, ma'am. Easy, I've got you. There you go. You alright?"
You blink up at the man beside you. He’s older, fifty perhaps, with a salt-grey beard, a sun-browned face and a leather work-apron stained with what might be tanner's oil. There's a handcart at his hip and you reason he must have been crossing the lane the other way and stepped neatly into your path the moment your toe caught.
“You need to watch your step,” he says kindly. “These roads…”
He doesn't finish his sentence because Din is there, very suddenly, very fast, and there’s a sound you’ve never heard before, a low metallic snarl coming through the modulator that is barely shaped like a word at all. The older man's eyes go wide and he steps back, both hands going up at once.
"Easy, friend, easy. She tripped and I caught her, that's all."
Din hasn’t drawn his blaster, but his hand is on the grip of it and the grip is half out of the holster and the visor is cantered on the older man's face as he steps back with his hands still high.
"Din," you say.
"Step away from her."
"I’m doing it, friend, doing it."
"Din."
"Step away…"
"He caught me, Din."
"…from her."
"He caught me!"
It comes out of you at full volume and the visor twitches, finally, off the older man's face and toward yours. You round on Din with your face hot, your breath short and the cold sweat of the near-fall still standing on the back of your neck.
"He caught me, Din. I tripped and I would have gone down on my hands and knees on the cobbles, but he caught me. He’s…a stranger on a street who saw a woman fall, and he put his hands out and caught me, and you’re…you’re out here with your blaster half-drawn…!"
"He was…"
"He was catching me! Holster it. Holster it, Din."
His hand doesn’t move, the visor still on you, and you can feel the small private way his shoulders are shaking. Just barely, just at the edge of it.
Adrenaline.
Fear.
The small sound he made when your toe caught is still hanging in the air between you, and you know, you know in some quiet place behind the anger, that the man with his hand on the blaster is a man who just watched the only thing in his life trip on cobbles and you know – you know – that whatever came out of him in the next half second wasn’t aimed at the bearded stranger so much as at the world that put the cobbles there.
You know it, but today, you can’t afford to know it.
"Holster. It. Din."
He does as you ask, slow and careful and you wait to hear the click of the strap going back across the grip.
You turn back to the older man, still standing with his hands raised.
"I'm so sorry," you say, your voice shaking slightly. "I'm so sorry. He…he isn't normally…I tripped, I…thank you. Thank you for catching me. I would have…thank you."
"Nothing to it, ma'am." He lowers his hands, slowly, watching the visor as he does it. "Glad I was there. You take care of yourself, and…" his eyes flick to Din, careful, almost amused now that the blaster is back in its holster, "you take care of her, friend. She's worth it."
"Thank you," you say again, because you don’t trust yourself with any other words.
The older man tips his head to you, picks up the handles of his cart and wheels it past the two of you down the lane. He doesn’t look back, and you watch his salt-grey head go until the cart turns the corner and is gone.
Then you round on Din again.
"What the hell was that?"
"You almost fell."
"I did almost fall. I almost fell, and a nice man caught me, and you came out of nowhere with your hand on your gun…"
"I didn't know him."
"You don't know the baker, Din! You don't know the woman at the pump! You don't know anyone in this entire settlement except Karga! You can’t draw on every person who…"
"I didn't draw."
"You half drew."
"He had hands on you."
"He was holding me up!"
"I didn't…" The modulator clicks. "I didn't see…I saw…I saw you go down and I saw a man on you and I…I didn't…"
"You didn't see because you were too busy reacting, Din, that's the whole… that is the whole problem this morning!"
You stop because your voice has gone high again and your hands are shaking and your knees, very suddenly, are not particularly interested in holding you up. You scrub your hands over your face and breathe, hard, twice, three times as he takes a step towards you.
You hold up your other hand and he stops.
"Don't. Don't come any closer. Don't put your hands on me. Don't say cyar'ika. I can’t…I can’t do this in the middle of the lane, Din. I can’t do this with you with your visor on at me in the middle of the lane fifteen minutes after you let a stranger tell me I have to give up our home."
"Cyar'ika…"
"I said don't."
He stops where he is, three paces off, gloved hands open at his sides now, helmet very slightly tipped.
"I need…" you start. "I need to not be near you for an hour, Din."
You see – you can’t read the visor, but you can read the shoulders – the small terrible flinch travel through him.
"Cyar'ika…"
"An hour. That's all. I'm not…I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going off-world, I'm just…I need an hour, Din. I need an hour to…to breathe without…”
You don't finish and he nods, slowly.
"An hour," he says. "Where will you…?"
"I don't know."
"Cyar'ika, please. Just…tell me where you'll be. So I know. So I…"
"Karga's, probably."
"Okay. I'll…" The modulator clicks and he shifts his weight. "I'll be at the ship. I'll…I'll be at the ship. I'll be there."
"Thank you."
He doesn't say anything else. He stands a long moment with the wind pulling at his cape and the visor on your face, and then he tips the helmet and he turns, and walks away. You don’t watch him go. You stand with your back to him and your eyes on the cobbles until the sound of the boots has gone around a corner and faded into the general low noise of the settlement waking up around you.
Then you breathe out and start walking again.
You don't get half a block before you hear the first shot.
It comes from somewhere two streets over – a single clean crack of a blaster bolt fired in open air, the kind of sound that, on any other planet in the galaxy, would send people running for cover. On Nevarro, it makes the woman at the pump look up, frown, and go back to filling her jug.
Bounty business – always somebody's. You hear it and you don’t break stride.
The second shot is closer.
The third is closer still and is followed by the dense answering chatter of an automatic carbine, and that, you’ve lived on a gunship long enough to know, is not bounty business. Bounty business is precise. Bounty business is one shot, one body, the careful pop of a hunter who’s been paid to bring a target down. Carbines on full auto are something else. Carbines on full auto are people in a panic.
You stop in the middle of the lane, turn your head and look down the cross-street to your left.
A man is running toward you, full out, his cloak streaming behind him, one hand pressed to his side where the dark of blood has already started to spread through the lighter brown of his shirt. Behind him, perhaps thirty meters back, three more figures spill out of an alley mouth – armoured and mismatched – and one of them brings up a carbine. The next crack of bolts comes down the lane and the running man jerks, mid-stride, and goes down on his face on the cobbles ten paces from you.
You don't think – you move. More than a year on the Crest has done that – has put something in you that doesn’t need permission from your higher brain to act, that gets your feet under you and your body sideways and your hand to the small of your back to where your own blaster is clipped against the waistband of your trousers.
You’re behind the corner of a shuttered stall before the next bolt comes down the lane, your back flat to the rough wood, your hand on the grip. Breathing in, you count and estimate you have perhaps four seconds before the attackers cover the distance and see you.
The shuttered stall at your back is the corner of a dry-goods shop. There’s a closed door two meters to your right which could be locked. If it is, you’ll be standing in a recessed doorway with nowhere to go when they come around the corner. If it’s not locked you may be inside it with the door bolted behind you in three seconds, and that is the play, the only play, the one Din would take if Din were here.
A door opens across the lane, ten meters down and a woman's face appears in the gap, dark-eyed and quick. She sees you, sees what’s coming up the lane, and doesn’t hesitate. She flings the door wide and jerks her head for you to run inside.
You go low and fast, the blaster in your hand low at your hip and you’re halfway across the lane when the first of the attackers rounds the corner and sees you.
"Hey!"
The bolt sings past your ear close enough that you feel the heat of it on your cheekbone.
You turn at the hip, the way Din’s taught you, your weight already moving, and fire twice. One of them drops. You don't see where you hit him because you don't have time. You’re already inside the door and the woman is slamming it behind you and dropping a heavy iron bar across it, and the next bolt that hits the door sounds like a hammer ringing on a bell.
You go down on one knee because your knees, very suddenly, have decided they’re done.
The woman puts her hand on your shoulder. “Are you hit?”
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm…I'm not hit. I'm… Your free hand moves to your belly. The woman's eyes go to it, widen, briefly, then narrow into something fierce.
"Up," she says. “Behind the bar. Now."
The bar is heavy stone. You crouch behind it and the woman grabs a slug-thrower from under the counter, an old long-barrelled thing with a stock worn shiny by the press of many hands. She racks it once with a small dry sound that’s almost reassuring.
The door takes another hit. Then another. Then…silence.
"They're going around," the woman murmurs. "Stay down."
You stay down, your hand shaking around the grip of the blaster. Your other hand is flat to your belly, and you can feel – over the slamming of your own pulse – the wet little drum you heard this morning in the midwife's office. Only it’s yours, doubled and quickened and filling your whole skull.
The kitchen door opens with a kick. You hear the woman fire and a man scream as he goes down. Then you hear the chatter of the carbine and the sound of the woman’s body hitting the floorboards.
"No…"
You're up before you've decided to be up, your back coming off the bar and the blaster coming up in both hands. The second man is coming around the end of the bar with his weapon swinging toward where the woman has fallen, his eyes find you and widen as you fire.
The first shot goes wide. The second catches him in the throat and he goes down sideways into a stack of clay jugs which explode on impact, and he is, abruptly, not a problem anymore.
You drop back down because the third one is still out there. You didn’t see him follow the second one in, so he must be outside, watching the front again. You’re not sure how many shots you have left, and the woman behind the bar is making a thin wet sound that’s not encouraging. Your hands are shaking so hard now you can hear the small metallic chatter of the grip-plate against your thumb.
You crawl to where the woman has gone down. She’s on her side, her hand pressed to her throat where the carbine has caught her along the side of the neck, the dark blood pumping slow but steady between her fingers. Her eyes find yours and she tries unsuccessfully to speak. Then she lifts her other hand and points at the front door.
You hear it. The iron bar across the front door is moving, lifting from the outside. The third man must have something, a tool, a magnetic lifter, something that’s pulling the bar up out of its brackets from the outside, and in perhaps fifteen seconds the bar’s going to come free and the door’s going to swing open and he’s going to walk in and you’re going to be on the floor of a tavern with nowhere left to go.
The iron bar lifts another inch.
You aim for the door, bracing your elbows on the dead woman's hip, and you sight down the barrel and wait. Your hands shake as the bar lifts another inch and the door creaks, very faintly, against the frame.
Stay alive, you think. Stay alive. I love you. Stay alive.
The bar comes free, the door swings open, and the thing that comes through is not the third man.
The thing that comes through is beskar.
He comes through low and fast, cape streaming behind him, visor already locked on the figure to his right at the door's edge. The long blade comes out from under the cape in a single clean arc, and there is a sound, brief and wet and final, and the third man's carbine clatters to the floorboards. His body follows half a second later, and Din is in the doorway with the blade in one hand and the blaster in the other, the visor sweeping the room, finding the second man dead among the clay jugs, finding the woman dead on the floor at your hip, and finally – finally – finding you.
"Cyar'ika…"
You don't speak because you can't, because something in your chest has come unhooked and the wet sound at the back of your throat is too big to be a word. The blaster is still up, your hands are still shaking, and you can’t, for one long stunned moment, make your hands lower it.
He drops both his weapons. The blade hits the floorboards with a clatter, the blaster going down a heartbeat after it, and he’s across the room in three long strides, dropping to his knees on the bloody floorboards in front of you. His hands close carefully over yours and he eases the blaster down out of your hands and sets it on the floor at his knee. Then his hands come back to you, and they’re everywhere at once.
Your face. Your neck. Your shoulders.
The visor sweeps you, his hands running over you like a man checking a casualty in the field, his palms flat to your ribs and then down to your hips and then spreading wide and warm over your belly.
"Are you hit, cyar'ika? Are you hit? Tell me."
"No."
"Cyar'ika…"
"I'm not…I’m not hit.”
"Anywhere, cyar'ika, even a…even a graze, even a… "
"I'm not, I swear. I'm not hit. She is. She's..."
You turn your head and he follows, the visor finding the woman at your hip, the dark spreading slow under her on the boards, the eyes already gone.
"She…she pulled me in here. She got me behind the bar. She shot the first one through the kitchen and the carbine got her and I…Din, I…I had to…there was a third one, he was…he was lifting the bar, he had…"
"Cyar'ika. Cyar'ika, shh. Breathe. Breathe with me. Breathe."
He pulls you against him, one hand spread over the back of your head and the other still on the curve of your belly and you breathe in shakily against him. The cape comes around you and you bury your face into his throat and breathe.
"I've got you," he says, into the crown of your head. “I've got you. I've got you, cyar'ika. I've got you."
"Din…"
"I've got you."
"How did you…how did you know?"
"I heard the shots. I heard the carbine and I…I started running. I started running the second I heard the second shot. I…I came up the lane, and I saw a man on his face on the cobbles, and I saw a door open and I knew. I knew. I knew it was you. I…"
"Din…"
"I almost…I almost didn't get here."
"You got here."
"Cyar'ika…"
"You got here, Din, you got here. Look at me. You got here."
He looks at you and you can’t see his face, can’t see his eyes, can’t see whatever ragged thing is behind the visor right now, and for the first time today you don’t need to. You can read the way the visor is shaking, just barely, on your face. You can read the way the hand on your belly is shaking, just barely, against your tunic. You can read every single thing his shoulders are doing and what they’re doing is coming apart, slow and silent, the way they come apart when there’s nobody to see them, the way they come apart when only you’re in the room.
You lift one shaking hand and press it, flat, to the side of the helmet. "I'm here. I'm okay. We're okay.”
"Mhi solus tome, Mhi solus dar'tome, Mhi me'dinui an, Mhi ba'juri verde,” he says, voice cracking over the words.
You swallow and shake your head, “I…”
“We are one together, we are one when parted, we share all, we will raise warriors.” He nods slowly. “Mandalorian wedding vows. The riduurock.”
His hand on your belly spreads wider, thumb stroking across the small soft curve of you. The visor lowers against your forehead and doesn’t move.
"Are you...are you asking me to marry you? Here...now?"
"Yes," he replies, the helmet nodding fiercely. "You said the answer would be yes so...marry me cyar'ika, please...marry me. Say...say it back, please."
“Mhi solus tome, Mhi solus dar'tome, Mhi me'dinui an, Mhi ba'juri verde,” you repeat as best you can, tripping slightly over some of the pronunciation. “We are one together, we are one when parted, we share all, we will raise warriors.”
“I love you,” he says quietly. “I love you, cyar’ika, you and our baby. Our baby.”
“I love you too,” you sniff. “I love you so much.”
Somewhere outside in the lane you hear the sound of running footsteps, shouting and the rising whoop of Karga's settlement-guard whistles. Inside the tavern there is only the small, ragged breath of him through the modulator and the slow wet pulse of the woman's blood spreading on the boards beside you, and the baby under his palm, still going.
"She's okay," you whisper. "Din, she's okay. I can feel her. She's okay."
“She?”
“It’s a she today.”
"You can't feel her yet."
"I can today."
"Cyar'ika…"
"I can today, Din."
He makes a sound, something low, broken and entirely without language and presses the helmet more firmly against you.
"We’re getting off this floor," he says, finally. "We’re getting off this floor and you’re going straight back to Vesha. She’s going to look at you, look at…at her. She’s going to tell me you’re both…both…”
"Okay."
"Yes."
"Okay."
"And then…"
"And then we go home, Din. To the Crest. Take me home."
"Okay," he says.
The settlement-guard whistles are getting closer. Karga's voice is somewhere out in the lane, bellowing orders. Din slides one arm under your knees and the other under your shoulders and lifts you carefully, like you weigh nothing, like he’s afraid of waking something, and you let him for once, without arguing.
You loop your arms around his neck and press your face into him, closing your eyes. His cape comes around the both of you, and he carries you out of the tavern over the bodies of three men, toward Karga who’s already running up the lane with his coat flapping, mouth open around your name.
This is fine. I’m fine. It’s all fine. My eyes are just recycling themselves. These water works are here to ensure the body is functioning properly 😭😭😭
This was so tense, but so rewarding! I really hope they talk now, everything out in the open! But I can also totally picture something just kind of exploding too. You’ve got so many directions this can go. I really loved how you described him coming in the door and how the rest of the chapter plays out once he’s eliminated the threat.
You’ve got great stuff! Thank you as always for sharing with us!!
Summary: You need some time away from Din until a moment of panic leads to reunion.
Warnings: 18+only. I promise the smut will be back!
A/N: Greetings from Portugal! 🇵🇹 Good thing I had this written before going away! Enjoy! 🥰
One/Two/Three/Four/Five/Six/Seven/Eight/Nine/Ten
Din Masterlist
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You hear him before you've gone twenty paces.
The footfalls are unmistakable. Beskar boots on cobble have a sound nothing else in the galaxy quite makes – that dense clink under each step, the weight of a man who’s carrying eight kilos of metal on his torso and not bothering to walk quietly about it.
He’s not running because Din has never run after you. But he’s walking, fast, with the long deliberate stride of a man who knows he’s faster than you are and is choosing, very pointedly, not to close the distance entirely.
"Cyar'ika."
You don't turn and walk faster.
"Cyar'ika…. stop."
You don't stop, because if you do, he’ll catch you and if he catches you he’ll put his hands on your shoulders the way he always does and tip the visor down to your face and say something low and careful through the modulator and you will, like an idiot, like a soft, tired pregnant idiot, fold against him and forgive him for things he hasn’t yet apologised for, and you will not, you’ve decided, do that this morning.
So, you walk faster down the uneven lane, past the woman at the pump, past a small cat that scrambles off a low wall in front of you, past a stack of empty crates and a Rodian unloading a hover-pallet who lifts his head as the both of you go by.
"Cyar'ika, please."
"Don't, Din."
The cobbles get worse. Karga's settlement has grown faster than its road crews can keep up with, and there’s a stretch along the lane where the old volcanic-rock paving meets the newer duracrete patch in a small uneven seam, and you don’t see it.
Your toe catches and your hand flies out to break the fall. The world tips and you hear the small involuntary sound of your own breath punching out of you. Somewhere behind you, the modulator say cyar'ika in a voice you’ve never quite heard out of it before, sharp and high and almost cracked.
A hand catches your elbow – a bare hand, broad and weathered and warm. It hooks under your arm and lifts, and an arm goes round your other side at the waist and steadies you upright.
"Easy, ma'am. Easy, I've got you. There you go. You alright?"
You blink up at the man beside you. He’s older, fifty perhaps, with a salt-grey beard, a sun-browned face and a leather work-apron stained with what might be tanner's oil. There's a handcart at his hip and you reason he must have been crossing the lane the other way and stepped neatly into your path the moment your toe caught.
“You need to watch your step,” he says kindly. “These roads…”
He doesn't finish his sentence because Din is there, very suddenly, very fast, and there’s a sound you’ve never heard before, a low metallic snarl coming through the modulator that is barely shaped like a word at all. The older man's eyes go wide and he steps back, both hands going up at once.
"Easy, friend, easy. She tripped and I caught her, that's all."
Din hasn’t drawn his blaster, but his hand is on the grip of it and the grip is half out of the holster and the visor is cantered on the older man's face as he steps back with his hands still high.
"Din," you say.
"Step away from her."
"I’m doing it, friend, doing it."
"Din."
"Step away…"
"He caught me, Din."
"…from her."
"He caught me!"
It comes out of you at full volume and the visor twitches, finally, off the older man's face and toward yours. You round on Din with your face hot, your breath short and the cold sweat of the near-fall still standing on the back of your neck.
"He caught me, Din. I tripped and I would have gone down on my hands and knees on the cobbles, but he caught me. He’s…a stranger on a street who saw a woman fall, and he put his hands out and caught me, and you’re…you’re out here with your blaster half-drawn…!"
"He was…"
"He was catching me! Holster it. Holster it, Din."
His hand doesn’t move, the visor still on you, and you can feel the small private way his shoulders are shaking. Just barely, just at the edge of it.
Adrenaline.
Fear.
The small sound he made when your toe caught is still hanging in the air between you, and you know, you know in some quiet place behind the anger, that the man with his hand on the blaster is a man who just watched the only thing in his life trip on cobbles and you know – you know – that whatever came out of him in the next half second wasn’t aimed at the bearded stranger so much as at the world that put the cobbles there.
You know it, but today, you can’t afford to know it.
"Holster. It. Din."
He does as you ask, slow and careful and you wait to hear the click of the strap going back across the grip.
You turn back to the older man, still standing with his hands raised.
"I'm so sorry," you say, your voice shaking slightly. "I'm so sorry. He…he isn't normally…I tripped, I…thank you. Thank you for catching me. I would have…thank you."
"Nothing to it, ma'am." He lowers his hands, slowly, watching the visor as he does it. "Glad I was there. You take care of yourself, and…" his eyes flick to Din, careful, almost amused now that the blaster is back in its holster, "you take care of her, friend. She's worth it."
"Thank you," you say again, because you don’t trust yourself with any other words.
The older man tips his head to you, picks up the handles of his cart and wheels it past the two of you down the lane. He doesn’t look back, and you watch his salt-grey head go until the cart turns the corner and is gone.
Then you round on Din again.
"What the hell was that?"
"You almost fell."
"I did almost fall. I almost fell, and a nice man caught me, and you came out of nowhere with your hand on your gun…"
"I didn't know him."
"You don't know the baker, Din! You don't know the woman at the pump! You don't know anyone in this entire settlement except Karga! You can’t draw on every person who…"
"I didn't draw."
"You half drew."
"He had hands on you."
"He was holding me up!"
"I didn't…" The modulator clicks. "I didn't see…I saw…I saw you go down and I saw a man on you and I…I didn't…"
"You didn't see because you were too busy reacting, Din, that's the whole… that is the whole problem this morning!"
You stop because your voice has gone high again and your hands are shaking and your knees, very suddenly, are not particularly interested in holding you up. You scrub your hands over your face and breathe, hard, twice, three times as he takes a step towards you.
You hold up your other hand and he stops.
"Don't. Don't come any closer. Don't put your hands on me. Don't say cyar'ika. I can’t…I can’t do this in the middle of the lane, Din. I can’t do this with you with your visor on at me in the middle of the lane fifteen minutes after you let a stranger tell me I have to give up our home."
"Cyar'ika…"
"I said don't."
He stops where he is, three paces off, gloved hands open at his sides now, helmet very slightly tipped.
"I need…" you start. "I need to not be near you for an hour, Din."
You see – you can’t read the visor, but you can read the shoulders – the small terrible flinch travel through him.
"Cyar'ika…"
"An hour. That's all. I'm not…I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going off-world, I'm just…I need an hour, Din. I need an hour to…to breathe without…”
You don't finish and he nods, slowly.
"An hour," he says. "Where will you…?"
"I don't know."
"Cyar'ika, please. Just…tell me where you'll be. So I know. So I…"
"Karga's, probably."
"Okay. I'll…" The modulator clicks and he shifts his weight. "I'll be at the ship. I'll…I'll be at the ship. I'll be there."
"Thank you."
He doesn't say anything else. He stands a long moment with the wind pulling at his cape and the visor on your face, and then he tips the helmet and he turns, and walks away. You don’t watch him go. You stand with your back to him and your eyes on the cobbles until the sound of the boots has gone around a corner and faded into the general low noise of the settlement waking up around you.
Then you breathe out and start walking again.
You don't get half a block before you hear the first shot.
It comes from somewhere two streets over – a single clean crack of a blaster bolt fired in open air, the kind of sound that, on any other planet in the galaxy, would send people running for cover. On Nevarro, it makes the woman at the pump look up, frown, and go back to filling her jug.
Bounty business – always somebody's. You hear it and you don’t break stride.
The second shot is closer.
The third is closer still and is followed by the dense answering chatter of an automatic carbine, and that, you’ve lived on a gunship long enough to know, is not bounty business. Bounty business is precise. Bounty business is one shot, one body, the careful pop of a hunter who’s been paid to bring a target down. Carbines on full auto are something else. Carbines on full auto are people in a panic.
You stop in the middle of the lane, turn your head and look down the cross-street to your left.
A man is running toward you, full out, his cloak streaming behind him, one hand pressed to his side where the dark of blood has already started to spread through the lighter brown of his shirt. Behind him, perhaps thirty meters back, three more figures spill out of an alley mouth – armoured and mismatched – and one of them brings up a carbine. The next crack of bolts comes down the lane and the running man jerks, mid-stride, and goes down on his face on the cobbles ten paces from you.
You don't think – you move. More than a year on the Crest has done that – has put something in you that doesn’t need permission from your higher brain to act, that gets your feet under you and your body sideways and your hand to the small of your back to where your own blaster is clipped against the waistband of your trousers.
You’re behind the corner of a shuttered stall before the next bolt comes down the lane, your back flat to the rough wood, your hand on the grip. Breathing in, you count and estimate you have perhaps four seconds before the attackers cover the distance and see you.
The shuttered stall at your back is the corner of a dry-goods shop. There’s a closed door two meters to your right which could be locked. If it is, you’ll be standing in a recessed doorway with nowhere to go when they come around the corner. If it’s not locked you may be inside it with the door bolted behind you in three seconds, and that is the play, the only play, the one Din would take if Din were here.
A door opens across the lane, ten meters down and a woman's face appears in the gap, dark-eyed and quick. She sees you, sees what’s coming up the lane, and doesn’t hesitate. She flings the door wide and jerks her head for you to run inside.
You go low and fast, the blaster in your hand low at your hip and you’re halfway across the lane when the first of the attackers rounds the corner and sees you.
"Hey!"
The bolt sings past your ear close enough that you feel the heat of it on your cheekbone.
You turn at the hip, the way Din’s taught you, your weight already moving, and fire twice. One of them drops. You don't see where you hit him because you don't have time. You’re already inside the door and the woman is slamming it behind you and dropping a heavy iron bar across it, and the next bolt that hits the door sounds like a hammer ringing on a bell.
You go down on one knee because your knees, very suddenly, have decided they’re done.
The woman puts her hand on your shoulder. “Are you hit?”
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm…I'm not hit. I'm… Your free hand moves to your belly. The woman's eyes go to it, widen, briefly, then narrow into something fierce.
"Up," she says. “Behind the bar. Now."
The bar is heavy stone. You crouch behind it and the woman grabs a slug-thrower from under the counter, an old long-barrelled thing with a stock worn shiny by the press of many hands. She racks it once with a small dry sound that’s almost reassuring.
The door takes another hit. Then another. Then…silence.
"They're going around," the woman murmurs. "Stay down."
You stay down, your hand shaking around the grip of the blaster. Your other hand is flat to your belly, and you can feel – over the slamming of your own pulse – the wet little drum you heard this morning in the midwife's office. Only it’s yours, doubled and quickened and filling your whole skull.
The kitchen door opens with a kick. You hear the woman fire and a man scream as he goes down. Then you hear the chatter of the carbine and the sound of the woman’s body hitting the floorboards.
"No…"
You're up before you've decided to be up, your back coming off the bar and the blaster coming up in both hands. The second man is coming around the end of the bar with his weapon swinging toward where the woman has fallen, his eyes find you and widen as you fire.
The first shot goes wide. The second catches him in the throat and he goes down sideways into a stack of clay jugs which explode on impact, and he is, abruptly, not a problem anymore.
You drop back down because the third one is still out there. You didn’t see him follow the second one in, so he must be outside, watching the front again. You’re not sure how many shots you have left, and the woman behind the bar is making a thin wet sound that’s not encouraging. Your hands are shaking so hard now you can hear the small metallic chatter of the grip-plate against your thumb.
You crawl to where the woman has gone down. She’s on her side, her hand pressed to her throat where the carbine has caught her along the side of the neck, the dark blood pumping slow but steady between her fingers. Her eyes find yours and she tries unsuccessfully to speak. Then she lifts her other hand and points at the front door.
You hear it. The iron bar across the front door is moving, lifting from the outside. The third man must have something, a tool, a magnetic lifter, something that’s pulling the bar up out of its brackets from the outside, and in perhaps fifteen seconds the bar’s going to come free and the door’s going to swing open and he’s going to walk in and you’re going to be on the floor of a tavern with nowhere left to go.
The iron bar lifts another inch.
You aim for the door, bracing your elbows on the dead woman's hip, and you sight down the barrel and wait. Your hands shake as the bar lifts another inch and the door creaks, very faintly, against the frame.
Stay alive, you think. Stay alive. I love you. Stay alive.
The bar comes free, the door swings open, and the thing that comes through is not the third man.
The thing that comes through is beskar.
He comes through low and fast, cape streaming behind him, visor already locked on the figure to his right at the door's edge. The long blade comes out from under the cape in a single clean arc, and there is a sound, brief and wet and final, and the third man's carbine clatters to the floorboards. His body follows half a second later, and Din is in the doorway with the blade in one hand and the blaster in the other, the visor sweeping the room, finding the second man dead among the clay jugs, finding the woman dead on the floor at your hip, and finally – finally – finding you.
"Cyar'ika…"
You don't speak because you can't, because something in your chest has come unhooked and the wet sound at the back of your throat is too big to be a word. The blaster is still up, your hands are still shaking, and you can’t, for one long stunned moment, make your hands lower it.
He drops both his weapons. The blade hits the floorboards with a clatter, the blaster going down a heartbeat after it, and he’s across the room in three long strides, dropping to his knees on the bloody floorboards in front of you. His hands close carefully over yours and he eases the blaster down out of your hands and sets it on the floor at his knee. Then his hands come back to you, and they’re everywhere at once.
Your face. Your neck. Your shoulders.
The visor sweeps you, his hands running over you like a man checking a casualty in the field, his palms flat to your ribs and then down to your hips and then spreading wide and warm over your belly.
"Are you hit, cyar'ika? Are you hit? Tell me."
"No."
"Cyar'ika…"
"I'm not…I’m not hit.”
"Anywhere, cyar'ika, even a…even a graze, even a… "
"I'm not, I swear. I'm not hit. She is. She's..."
You turn your head and he follows, the visor finding the woman at your hip, the dark spreading slow under her on the boards, the eyes already gone.
"She…she pulled me in here. She got me behind the bar. She shot the first one through the kitchen and the carbine got her and I…Din, I…I had to…there was a third one, he was…he was lifting the bar, he had…"
"Cyar'ika. Cyar'ika, shh. Breathe. Breathe with me. Breathe."
He pulls you against him, one hand spread over the back of your head and the other still on the curve of your belly and you breathe in shakily against him. The cape comes around you and you bury your face into his throat and breathe.
"I've got you," he says, into the crown of your head. “I've got you. I've got you, cyar'ika. I've got you."
"Din…"
"I've got you."
"How did you…how did you know?"
"I heard the shots. I heard the carbine and I…I started running. I started running the second I heard the second shot. I…I came up the lane, and I saw a man on his face on the cobbles, and I saw a door open and I knew. I knew. I knew it was you. I…"
"Din…"
"I almost…I almost didn't get here."
"You got here."
"Cyar'ika…"
"You got here, Din, you got here. Look at me. You got here."
He looks at you and you can’t see his face, can’t see his eyes, can’t see whatever ragged thing is behind the visor right now, and for the first time today you don’t need to. You can read the way the visor is shaking, just barely, on your face. You can read the way the hand on your belly is shaking, just barely, against your tunic. You can read every single thing his shoulders are doing and what they’re doing is coming apart, slow and silent, the way they come apart when there’s nobody to see them, the way they come apart when only you’re in the room.
You lift one shaking hand and press it, flat, to the side of the helmet. "I'm here. I'm okay. We're okay.”
"Mhi solus tome, Mhi solus dar'tome, Mhi me'dinui an, Mhi ba'juri verde,” he says, voice cracking over the words.
You swallow and shake your head, “I…”
“We are one together, we are one when parted, we share all, we will raise warriors.” He nods slowly. “Mandalorian wedding vows. The riduurock.”
His hand on your belly spreads wider, thumb stroking across the small soft curve of you. The visor lowers against your forehead and doesn’t move.
"Are you...are you asking me to marry you? Here...now?"
"Yes," he replies, the helmet nodding fiercely. "You said the answer would be yes so...marry me cyar'ika, please...marry me. Say...say it back, please."
“Mhi solus tome, Mhi solus dar'tome, Mhi me'dinui an, Mhi ba'juri verde,” you repeat as best you can, tripping slightly over some of the pronunciation. “We are one together, we are one when parted, we share all, we will raise warriors.”
“I love you,” he says quietly. “I love you, cyar’ika, you and our baby. Our baby.”
“I love you too,” you sniff. “I love you so much.”
Somewhere outside in the lane you hear the sound of running footsteps, shouting and the rising whoop of Karga's settlement-guard whistles. Inside the tavern there is only the small, ragged breath of him through the modulator and the slow wet pulse of the woman's blood spreading on the boards beside you, and the baby under his palm, still going.
"She's okay," you whisper. "Din, she's okay. I can feel her. She's okay."
“She?”
“It’s a she today.”
"You can't feel her yet."
"I can today."
"Cyar'ika…"
"I can today, Din."
He makes a sound, something low, broken and entirely without language and presses the helmet more firmly against you.
"We’re getting off this floor," he says, finally. "We’re getting off this floor and you’re going straight back to Vesha. She’s going to look at you, look at…at her. She’s going to tell me you’re both…both…”
"Okay."
"Yes."
"Okay."
"And then…"
"And then we go home, Din. To the Crest. Take me home."
"Okay," he says.
The settlement-guard whistles are getting closer. Karga's voice is somewhere out in the lane, bellowing orders. Din slides one arm under your knees and the other under your shoulders and lifts you carefully, like you weigh nothing, like he’s afraid of waking something, and you let him for once, without arguing.
You loop your arms around his neck and press your face into him, closing your eyes. His cape comes around the both of you, and he carries you out of the tavern over the bodies of three men, toward Karga who’s already running up the lane with his coat flapping, mouth open around your name.
Summary: You need some time away from Din until a moment of panic leads to reunion.
Warnings: 18+only. I promise the smut will be back!
A/N: Greetings from Portugal! 🇵🇹 Good thing I had this written before going away! Enjoy! 🥰
One/Two/Three/Four/Five/Six/Seven/Eight/Nine/Ten
Din Masterlist
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You hear him before you've gone twenty paces.
The footfalls are unmistakable. Beskar boots on cobble have a sound nothing else in the galaxy quite makes – that dense clink under each step, the weight of a man who’s carrying eight kilos of metal on his torso and not bothering to walk quietly about it.
He’s not running because Din has never run after you. But he’s walking, fast, with the long deliberate stride of a man who knows he’s faster than you are and is choosing, very pointedly, not to close the distance entirely.
"Cyar'ika."
You don't turn and walk faster.
"Cyar'ika…. stop."
You don't stop, because if you do, he’ll catch you and if he catches you he’ll put his hands on your shoulders the way he always does and tip the visor down to your face and say something low and careful through the modulator and you will, like an idiot, like a soft, tired pregnant idiot, fold against him and forgive him for things he hasn’t yet apologised for, and you will not, you’ve decided, do that this morning.
So, you walk faster down the uneven lane, past the woman at the pump, past a small cat that scrambles off a low wall in front of you, past a stack of empty crates and a Rodian unloading a hover-pallet who lifts his head as the both of you go by.
"Cyar'ika, please."
"Don't, Din."
The cobbles get worse. Karga's settlement has grown faster than its road crews can keep up with, and there’s a stretch along the lane where the old volcanic-rock paving meets the newer duracrete patch in a small uneven seam, and you don’t see it.
Your toe catches and your hand flies out to break the fall. The world tips and you hear the small involuntary sound of your own breath punching out of you. Somewhere behind you, the modulator say cyar'ika in a voice you’ve never quite heard out of it before, sharp and high and almost cracked.
A hand catches your elbow – a bare hand, broad and weathered and warm. It hooks under your arm and lifts, and an arm goes round your other side at the waist and steadies you upright.
"Easy, ma'am. Easy, I've got you. There you go. You alright?"
You blink up at the man beside you. He’s older, fifty perhaps, with a salt-grey beard, a sun-browned face and a leather work-apron stained with what might be tanner's oil. There's a handcart at his hip and you reason he must have been crossing the lane the other way and stepped neatly into your path the moment your toe caught.
“You need to watch your step,” he says kindly. “These roads…”
He doesn't finish his sentence because Din is there, very suddenly, very fast, and there’s a sound you’ve never heard before, a low metallic snarl coming through the modulator that is barely shaped like a word at all. The older man's eyes go wide and he steps back, both hands going up at once.
"Easy, friend, easy. She tripped and I caught her, that's all."
Din hasn’t drawn his blaster, but his hand is on the grip of it and the grip is half out of the holster and the visor is cantered on the older man's face as he steps back with his hands still high.
"Din," you say.
"Step away from her."
"I’m doing it, friend, doing it."
"Din."
"Step away…"
"He caught me, Din."
"…from her."
"He caught me!"
It comes out of you at full volume and the visor twitches, finally, off the older man's face and toward yours. You round on Din with your face hot, your breath short and the cold sweat of the near-fall still standing on the back of your neck.
"He caught me, Din. I tripped and I would have gone down on my hands and knees on the cobbles, but he caught me. He’s…a stranger on a street who saw a woman fall, and he put his hands out and caught me, and you’re…you’re out here with your blaster half-drawn…!"
"He was…"
"He was catching me! Holster it. Holster it, Din."
His hand doesn’t move, the visor still on you, and you can feel the small private way his shoulders are shaking. Just barely, just at the edge of it.
Adrenaline.
Fear.
The small sound he made when your toe caught is still hanging in the air between you, and you know, you know in some quiet place behind the anger, that the man with his hand on the blaster is a man who just watched the only thing in his life trip on cobbles and you know – you know – that whatever came out of him in the next half second wasn’t aimed at the bearded stranger so much as at the world that put the cobbles there.
You know it, but today, you can’t afford to know it.
"Holster. It. Din."
He does as you ask, slow and careful and you wait to hear the click of the strap going back across the grip.
You turn back to the older man, still standing with his hands raised.
"I'm so sorry," you say, your voice shaking slightly. "I'm so sorry. He…he isn't normally…I tripped, I…thank you. Thank you for catching me. I would have…thank you."
"Nothing to it, ma'am." He lowers his hands, slowly, watching the visor as he does it. "Glad I was there. You take care of yourself, and…" his eyes flick to Din, careful, almost amused now that the blaster is back in its holster, "you take care of her, friend. She's worth it."
"Thank you," you say again, because you don’t trust yourself with any other words.
The older man tips his head to you, picks up the handles of his cart and wheels it past the two of you down the lane. He doesn’t look back, and you watch his salt-grey head go until the cart turns the corner and is gone.
Then you round on Din again.
"What the hell was that?"
"You almost fell."
"I did almost fall. I almost fell, and a nice man caught me, and you came out of nowhere with your hand on your gun…"
"I didn't know him."
"You don't know the baker, Din! You don't know the woman at the pump! You don't know anyone in this entire settlement except Karga! You can’t draw on every person who…"
"I didn't draw."
"You half drew."
"He had hands on you."
"He was holding me up!"
"I didn't…" The modulator clicks. "I didn't see…I saw…I saw you go down and I saw a man on you and I…I didn't…"
"You didn't see because you were too busy reacting, Din, that's the whole… that is the whole problem this morning!"
You stop because your voice has gone high again and your hands are shaking and your knees, very suddenly, are not particularly interested in holding you up. You scrub your hands over your face and breathe, hard, twice, three times as he takes a step towards you.
You hold up your other hand and he stops.
"Don't. Don't come any closer. Don't put your hands on me. Don't say cyar'ika. I can’t…I can’t do this in the middle of the lane, Din. I can’t do this with you with your visor on at me in the middle of the lane fifteen minutes after you let a stranger tell me I have to give up our home."
"Cyar'ika…"
"I said don't."
He stops where he is, three paces off, gloved hands open at his sides now, helmet very slightly tipped.
"I need…" you start. "I need to not be near you for an hour, Din."
You see – you can’t read the visor, but you can read the shoulders – the small terrible flinch travel through him.
"Cyar'ika…"
"An hour. That's all. I'm not…I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going off-world, I'm just…I need an hour, Din. I need an hour to…to breathe without…”
You don't finish and he nods, slowly.
"An hour," he says. "Where will you…?"
"I don't know."
"Cyar'ika, please. Just…tell me where you'll be. So I know. So I…"
"Karga's, probably."
"Okay. I'll…" The modulator clicks and he shifts his weight. "I'll be at the ship. I'll…I'll be at the ship. I'll be there."
"Thank you."
He doesn't say anything else. He stands a long moment with the wind pulling at his cape and the visor on your face, and then he tips the helmet and he turns, and walks away. You don’t watch him go. You stand with your back to him and your eyes on the cobbles until the sound of the boots has gone around a corner and faded into the general low noise of the settlement waking up around you.
Then you breathe out and start walking again.
You don't get half a block before you hear the first shot.
It comes from somewhere two streets over – a single clean crack of a blaster bolt fired in open air, the kind of sound that, on any other planet in the galaxy, would send people running for cover. On Nevarro, it makes the woman at the pump look up, frown, and go back to filling her jug.
Bounty business – always somebody's. You hear it and you don’t break stride.
The second shot is closer.
The third is closer still and is followed by the dense answering chatter of an automatic carbine, and that, you’ve lived on a gunship long enough to know, is not bounty business. Bounty business is precise. Bounty business is one shot, one body, the careful pop of a hunter who’s been paid to bring a target down. Carbines on full auto are something else. Carbines on full auto are people in a panic.
You stop in the middle of the lane, turn your head and look down the cross-street to your left.
A man is running toward you, full out, his cloak streaming behind him, one hand pressed to his side where the dark of blood has already started to spread through the lighter brown of his shirt. Behind him, perhaps thirty meters back, three more figures spill out of an alley mouth – armoured and mismatched – and one of them brings up a carbine. The next crack of bolts comes down the lane and the running man jerks, mid-stride, and goes down on his face on the cobbles ten paces from you.
You don't think – you move. More than a year on the Crest has done that – has put something in you that doesn’t need permission from your higher brain to act, that gets your feet under you and your body sideways and your hand to the small of your back to where your own blaster is clipped against the waistband of your trousers.
You’re behind the corner of a shuttered stall before the next bolt comes down the lane, your back flat to the rough wood, your hand on the grip. Breathing in, you count and estimate you have perhaps four seconds before the attackers cover the distance and see you.
The shuttered stall at your back is the corner of a dry-goods shop. There’s a closed door two meters to your right which could be locked. If it is, you’ll be standing in a recessed doorway with nowhere to go when they come around the corner. If it’s not locked you may be inside it with the door bolted behind you in three seconds, and that is the play, the only play, the one Din would take if Din were here.
A door opens across the lane, ten meters down and a woman's face appears in the gap, dark-eyed and quick. She sees you, sees what’s coming up the lane, and doesn’t hesitate. She flings the door wide and jerks her head for you to run inside.
You go low and fast, the blaster in your hand low at your hip and you’re halfway across the lane when the first of the attackers rounds the corner and sees you.
"Hey!"
The bolt sings past your ear close enough that you feel the heat of it on your cheekbone.
You turn at the hip, the way Din’s taught you, your weight already moving, and fire twice. One of them drops. You don't see where you hit him because you don't have time. You’re already inside the door and the woman is slamming it behind you and dropping a heavy iron bar across it, and the next bolt that hits the door sounds like a hammer ringing on a bell.
You go down on one knee because your knees, very suddenly, have decided they’re done.
The woman puts her hand on your shoulder. “Are you hit?”
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm…I'm not hit. I'm… Your free hand moves to your belly. The woman's eyes go to it, widen, briefly, then narrow into something fierce.
"Up," she says. “Behind the bar. Now."
The bar is heavy stone. You crouch behind it and the woman grabs a slug-thrower from under the counter, an old long-barrelled thing with a stock worn shiny by the press of many hands. She racks it once with a small dry sound that’s almost reassuring.
The door takes another hit. Then another. Then…silence.
"They're going around," the woman murmurs. "Stay down."
You stay down, your hand shaking around the grip of the blaster. Your other hand is flat to your belly, and you can feel – over the slamming of your own pulse – the wet little drum you heard this morning in the midwife's office. Only it’s yours, doubled and quickened and filling your whole skull.
The kitchen door opens with a kick. You hear the woman fire and a man scream as he goes down. Then you hear the chatter of the carbine and the sound of the woman’s body hitting the floorboards.
"No…"
You're up before you've decided to be up, your back coming off the bar and the blaster coming up in both hands. The second man is coming around the end of the bar with his weapon swinging toward where the woman has fallen, his eyes find you and widen as you fire.
The first shot goes wide. The second catches him in the throat and he goes down sideways into a stack of clay jugs which explode on impact, and he is, abruptly, not a problem anymore.
You drop back down because the third one is still out there. You didn’t see him follow the second one in, so he must be outside, watching the front again. You’re not sure how many shots you have left, and the woman behind the bar is making a thin wet sound that’s not encouraging. Your hands are shaking so hard now you can hear the small metallic chatter of the grip-plate against your thumb.
You crawl to where the woman has gone down. She’s on her side, her hand pressed to her throat where the carbine has caught her along the side of the neck, the dark blood pumping slow but steady between her fingers. Her eyes find yours and she tries unsuccessfully to speak. Then she lifts her other hand and points at the front door.
You hear it. The iron bar across the front door is moving, lifting from the outside. The third man must have something, a tool, a magnetic lifter, something that’s pulling the bar up out of its brackets from the outside, and in perhaps fifteen seconds the bar’s going to come free and the door’s going to swing open and he’s going to walk in and you’re going to be on the floor of a tavern with nowhere left to go.
The iron bar lifts another inch.
You aim for the door, bracing your elbows on the dead woman's hip, and you sight down the barrel and wait. Your hands shake as the bar lifts another inch and the door creaks, very faintly, against the frame.
Stay alive, you think. Stay alive. I love you. Stay alive.
The bar comes free, the door swings open, and the thing that comes through is not the third man.
The thing that comes through is beskar.
He comes through low and fast, cape streaming behind him, visor already locked on the figure to his right at the door's edge. The long blade comes out from under the cape in a single clean arc, and there is a sound, brief and wet and final, and the third man's carbine clatters to the floorboards. His body follows half a second later, and Din is in the doorway with the blade in one hand and the blaster in the other, the visor sweeping the room, finding the second man dead among the clay jugs, finding the woman dead on the floor at your hip, and finally – finally – finding you.
"Cyar'ika…"
You don't speak because you can't, because something in your chest has come unhooked and the wet sound at the back of your throat is too big to be a word. The blaster is still up, your hands are still shaking, and you can’t, for one long stunned moment, make your hands lower it.
He drops both his weapons. The blade hits the floorboards with a clatter, the blaster going down a heartbeat after it, and he’s across the room in three long strides, dropping to his knees on the bloody floorboards in front of you. His hands close carefully over yours and he eases the blaster down out of your hands and sets it on the floor at his knee. Then his hands come back to you, and they’re everywhere at once.
Your face. Your neck. Your shoulders.
The visor sweeps you, his hands running over you like a man checking a casualty in the field, his palms flat to your ribs and then down to your hips and then spreading wide and warm over your belly.
"Are you hit, cyar'ika? Are you hit? Tell me."
"No."
"Cyar'ika…"
"I'm not…I’m not hit.”
"Anywhere, cyar'ika, even a…even a graze, even a… "
"I'm not, I swear. I'm not hit. She is. She's..."
You turn your head and he follows, the visor finding the woman at your hip, the dark spreading slow under her on the boards, the eyes already gone.
"She…she pulled me in here. She got me behind the bar. She shot the first one through the kitchen and the carbine got her and I…Din, I…I had to…there was a third one, he was…he was lifting the bar, he had…"
"Cyar'ika. Cyar'ika, shh. Breathe. Breathe with me. Breathe."
He pulls you against him, one hand spread over the back of your head and the other still on the curve of your belly and you breathe in shakily against him. The cape comes around you and you bury your face into his throat and breathe.
"I've got you," he says, into the crown of your head. “I've got you. I've got you, cyar'ika. I've got you."
"Din…"
"I've got you."
"How did you…how did you know?"
"I heard the shots. I heard the carbine and I…I started running. I started running the second I heard the second shot. I…I came up the lane, and I saw a man on his face on the cobbles, and I saw a door open and I knew. I knew. I knew it was you. I…"
"Din…"
"I almost…I almost didn't get here."
"You got here."
"Cyar'ika…"
"You got here, Din, you got here. Look at me. You got here."
He looks at you and you can’t see his face, can’t see his eyes, can’t see whatever ragged thing is behind the visor right now, and for the first time today you don’t need to. You can read the way the visor is shaking, just barely, on your face. You can read the way the hand on your belly is shaking, just barely, against your tunic. You can read every single thing his shoulders are doing and what they’re doing is coming apart, slow and silent, the way they come apart when there’s nobody to see them, the way they come apart when only you’re in the room.
You lift one shaking hand and press it, flat, to the side of the helmet. "I'm here. I'm okay. We're okay.”
"Mhi solus tome, Mhi solus dar'tome, Mhi me'dinui an, Mhi ba'juri verde,” he says, voice cracking over the words.
You swallow and shake your head, “I…”
“We are one together, we are one when parted, we share all, we will raise warriors.” He nods slowly. “Mandalorian wedding vows. The riduurock.”
His hand on your belly spreads wider, thumb stroking across the small soft curve of you. The visor lowers against your forehead and doesn’t move.
"Are you...are you asking me to marry you? Here...now?"
"Yes," he replies, the helmet nodding fiercely. "You said the answer would be yes so...marry me cyar'ika, please...marry me. Say...say it back, please."
“Mhi solus tome, Mhi solus dar'tome, Mhi me'dinui an, Mhi ba'juri verde,” you repeat as best you can, tripping slightly over some of the pronunciation. “We are one together, we are one when parted, we share all, we will raise warriors.”
“I love you,” he says quietly. “I love you, cyar’ika, you and our baby. Our baby.”
“I love you too,” you sniff. “I love you so much.”
Somewhere outside in the lane you hear the sound of running footsteps, shouting and the rising whoop of Karga's settlement-guard whistles. Inside the tavern there is only the small, ragged breath of him through the modulator and the slow wet pulse of the woman's blood spreading on the boards beside you, and the baby under his palm, still going.
"She's okay," you whisper. "Din, she's okay. I can feel her. She's okay."
“She?”
“It’s a she today.”
"You can't feel her yet."
"I can today."
"Cyar'ika…"
"I can today, Din."
He makes a sound, something low, broken and entirely without language and presses the helmet more firmly against you.
"We’re getting off this floor," he says, finally. "We’re getting off this floor and you’re going straight back to Vesha. She’s going to look at you, look at…at her. She’s going to tell me you’re both…both…”
"Okay."
"Yes."
"Okay."
"And then…"
"And then we go home, Din. To the Crest. Take me home."
"Okay," he says.
The settlement-guard whistles are getting closer. Karga's voice is somewhere out in the lane, bellowing orders. Din slides one arm under your knees and the other under your shoulders and lifts you carefully, like you weigh nothing, like he’s afraid of waking something, and you let him for once, without arguing.
You loop your arms around his neck and press your face into him, closing your eyes. His cape comes around the both of you, and he carries you out of the tavern over the bodies of three men, toward Karga who’s already running up the lane with his coat flapping, mouth open around your name.
I’d really hoped to be able to update The Catfish Invasion before I go on holiday but it’s just not going to be possible. So the next chapter will hopefully be posted on Saturday 18th July.
Until then, keep Frankie and Reader in your thoughts 🥰
I’d really hoped to be able to update The Catfish Invasion before I go on holiday but it’s just not going to be possible. So the next chapter will hopefully be posted on Saturday 18th July.
Until then, keep Frankie and Reader in your thoughts 🥰
I’m also an “older” woman. I’m anonymous too. But I have followed Pedro for a very long time. I usually only read the wide age gaps if I love the writer. I am happy to read a young woman but not as young as a 20 year old with a fifty year old Joel.
Thanks for reaching out! In terms of age gaps, I’ve written a few different ones.
In The Devil’s Smile, Reader is 26 and Joel is 50.
In Hair Trigger, Reader is 38 and Joel is 55.
In A Different Kind of Love, Reader is 45 and Joel is 55.
I do now sometimes find it hard to relate to the really big age gaps, though when I was younger I did love an older man! As I get older I find myself leaning more into the reality of my own age (especially as I’m only 7 years younger than Pedro, so it could definitely happen 😂😉)
Thank you so much for Season of Change. I’m a 49 year old woman going through this exact thing and I’m lucky to have a spouse who is as supportive as Joel. It truly hit home! This is the Joel x Reader I want to see more of in this fandom!!
You’re so welcome! I’m not quite there yet but I know it’ll be coming 🫣
As much as I love an age gap, as much as I love hot smut, as much as I love a good pregnancy, and as much as I love a Reader dealing with an emotionally closed off Joel, I do also love a fic with a more mature female voice experiencing mature female problems 🥰
Might have to think up some more scenarios when I have the chance! 😂
Summary: You’re a woman of a certain age and things are changing in your body. Fortunately, you have Joel Miller in your corner.
Warnings: Mature, implied sexual contact, discussions of perimenopause.
A/N: This has evolved from this WIP. Enjoy 🥰
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The fire has burned down to amber coals, throwing low light across the bedroom ceiling, and you lie there staring at the familiar map of cracks in the plaster, trying to figure out what’s wrong with you.
Joel's hand rests on your hip, patient and still, like it has been for a while now.
"We don't have to," he says, the same words he's used three times this week alone, delivered in the same careful register – not cold or resentful, but something more exhausted than either of those things. Like a man who’s learned to keep his voice very level around something that spooks easily.
"I know we don't have to."
You hear the snap in your own voice and hate yourself for it. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean…"
"It’s okay."
But it isn’t okay. Not because he’s angry, but because he isn’t and somehow that’s almost worse. You'd prefer anger. Anger would give you something to push against, something to explain yourself to. Instead, there’s just this careful, considered gentleness that makes you feel like a wounded animal being handled by someone who doesn’t want to lose a finger.
You shift onto your side, facing away from him. His hand stays on your hip for a moment longer, then withdraws to his own side of the bed.
The coals tick and outside the wind moves through Jackson in long dark sighs that mirror how you feel.
Tears prick at the corners of your eyes, because you haven’t always been like this.
You can remember – with a vividness that now feels almost cruel – the way it used to be. The hunger and ease of it. Joel’s not a demonstrative man by most measures. He doesn’t talk about his feelings any more than he absolutely has to or offer reassurance or emotional narration. But in bed, in that particular dark, he’s always been completely present with you in a way that feels like its own language.
His hands know you, have learned you with the patient attention of a man who genuinely wants to learn something and who finds the subject endlessly interesting.
You’ve wanted him just as badly, more some weeks. You've been the one reaching across the space between you in the early morning light, when he makes a low pleased sound and pulls you closer, and it’s been easy. Not effortless, but easy in the way that breathing is easy, the way you don't have to think about it.
Now it feels like breathing at altitude. Like your body has quietly, without consulting you, moved somewhere the air’s thinner.
It started, if you had to name a starting point, maybe eight months ago and it was small things at first. Like when you went to bed on a regular Tuesday intending to reach for him and found yourself simply...uninterested.
You weren’t tired, not upset, not distracted by anything specific. You were just blank where the want usually lives. You rolled over, went to sleep and told yourself it was nothing. That it was a phase, or a bad week or, more likely, the cumulative weight of living in this world doing its usual arithmetic on desire.
But the blank Tuesdays became blank weekends, the weeks between stretching. And when you do try – because you love him and don’t want to lose the thread of this thing between you – there’s the dryness.
You've never experienced it like this, that specific discomfort that makes everything feel wrong, that makes you tense when you've always melted, that turns something that’s been pleasure into something you’re simply enduring and hoping he can’t tell.
Of course he can tell.
Joel Miller has spent twenty years before ever laying eyes on you learning to read threat and deception in the smallest tells of human behaviour. He isn’t going to miss the way you go a little still, or the way your breathing shifts from something good to something controlled.
He pulled back the first time, quietly, without making it a thing and kissed you carefully.
But you saw his face in the low light, saw the confusion there, the careful way he smoothed it back to neutral, and you felt a cold shame settle into your chest that hasn’t fully left since.
****
The hot flashes start in October.
That’s what finally makes you go to Dr Vee.
They come at night mostly, though not exclusively – this drenching, furnace-blast heat that wakes you from sleep damp and disoriented, your heart clattering, kicking the blankets off while Joel sleeps beside you oblivious. Sometimes you get up and stand at the window in the cold air until your skin cools and your pulse settles.
Once he wakes, finds you there and asks if you’re all right. You tell him you’re fine, just warm and that he should go back to sleep. And he does, slowly, with that same careful patient stillness he's been wearing like armour for months.
The sleep disruption makes everything worse. You’re tired in a way that sits in your bones. Your moods become unreliable, small things snagging at you. You snap and then feel terrible and then snap about feeling terrible. Your cycle has gone strange too – irregular, showing up when it pleases and sometimes not for two months running.
The brain fog is the worst indignity. You stand in the kitchen trying to remember what you've gone to get and find the word for it has just – slipped.
Like a wet bar of soap.
Gone.
You’re forty-six years old, you’re falling apart and you don’t know why. And you haven’t told Joel any of this properly because you don’t know how to explain something you don’t understand yourself.
Dr Vee is sixty-something and was a family physician before the outbreak, keeping meticulous notes in a series of composition notebooks and has a memory like a steel trap. She stitched your shoulder up two winters ago after a patrol gone sideways and, in some way, you trust her.
You sit on the paper-covered table, whilst she listens to you with the particular quality of attention that good doctors have. The kind that makes you feel like you’re the only person in the world and your problem is the only problem.
You tell her everything. The libido, the dryness, the hot flashes, the fatigue, the mood swings, the irregular cycle, the brain fog. Your voice stays level and clinical because you’re holding it that way with both hands.
When you finish, she’s quiet for a moment, tapping her pen against her notebook.
"How old are you?"
"Forty-six."
She nods slowly. "And these symptoms – all of them, taken together – when did they begin?"
"Eight, nine months ago, I guess. But they’ve come on gradually."
She nods again and sets her pen down. "I'm going to ask you something and I need you to think about whether any of this is new information or whether some part of you has already been thinking it."
You frown.
"Perimenopause," she says. "That’s the transitional phase before menopause. It can last anywhere from a few years to a decade. The hormonal fluctuations account for every symptom you've described – the hot flashes, the night sweats, the sleep disruption etc. The irregular cycle is also textbook." She pauses. "You're not falling apart. Your body is doing something it's been designed to do but just doing it rather loudly."
You sit with that for a moment.
Some part of you has known. Some quiet, careful part that you haven’t wanted to examine too directly because examining it means acknowledging it, and acknowledging it means – what? You’re not entirely sure what it means and that’s the problem.
"The obvious treatment is hormone replacement therapy," Dr Vee says, "which we don't have."
"Right."
"But there are things we can do. I have some dried black cohosh root which helps some women with the symptoms. There are also things you can do in your overall lifestyle things, which in Jackson, mostly amounts to what you're already doing. A cool sleeping environment is essential and help with managing stress which is, of course, not simple in this world.”
She writes something in her notebook.
"The genitourinary symptoms – that’s the dryness, the discomfort during sex – that's a direct effect of declining oestrogen affecting the vaginal tissue. I have some things that can help with that too. Vitamin E oil and coconut oil for example. It’s not the same as actual oestrogen cream, but they can provide some relief and work on lubrication, externally and otherwise."
You nod slowly.
"This is a normal transition,” she says gently. “It’s not a failing. A lot of women go through this without ever talking to anyone about it because it's been treated as something shameful or taboo for most of recorded history, which is frankly absurd, and I won't have that in my practice." She looks at you steadily. "You doing alright?"
"Yes," you say, your voice only wavering slightly. "I just…I didn't know what was wrong with me. I thought I was…"
"Thought you were what?"
"Losing something."
She pauses for a long moment. “Are you still with Joel?”
"Yes."
"Have you talked to him?"
"No."
She looks at you with the particular expression of a woman who’s seen a great many people avoid a great many necessary conversations.
"That might be worth doing."
****
You hold off for four days, telling yourself that you’re waiting for the right moment, the right mood, the right confluence of evening light and privacy and emotional bandwidth. In truth you’re waiting for the courage to arrive, and it’s taking its time.
The morning of the fifth day you wake before dawn from another hot flash, the searing flush cresting up through your chest and neck, and you sit up in bed breathing through it while Joel sleeps beside you.
You watch his face in the dark – the lines of it, the grey at his temples, the slight parting of his lips in sleep – and you think that this man has has watched you cry, has stitched you up, has held you through nightmares, has seen you covered in mud and blood and worse, has loved you through four winters and the particular relentless grinding difficulty of this world, and the idea that you can keep something from him because you’re embarrassed seems, in this predawn hour, genuinely absurd.
You get up and head to the kitchen. Standing at the window, you watch the first pale light come into the sky over the ridge and put the kettle on. When you hear his footsteps come up behind you, you don’t turn around.
"You're up early," he says casually.
"Couldn't sleep."
He comes and stands beside you at the window. You hear him pour himself a mug of coffee and lean against the counter drinking it quietly. If there’s one thing you’ve learned since you hitched your wagon to his it’s that Joel’s good at quiet. Sometimes it’s the thing you love most about him and sometimes it drives you absolutely insane.
"Joel.”
"Yeah."
You turn away from the window to see him watching you with those dark eyes that always seem to be calculating something, reading something or running some private assessment that you stopped trying to decode years ago. He’s in his undershirt and flannel pants, a crease from the pillow on his cheek, and he’s so familiar it aches.
"I need to tell you something," you say, "and I need you to not make it into something it isn't."
He pauses. "Okay."
"And I need you to not try to fix it immediately."
The pause lasts longer this time, and you can see his brain already working through a million different scenarios. "I'll try."
You wrap your hands around your mug and look at the table rather than at him.
"I went to see Dr Vee."
The quality of his silence shifts. You feel him go still in a specific way – the way he goes still when the information arriving requires him to revise something, to quickly run new calculations.
"When?" he asks, carefully.
"A few days ago."
"You didn't tell me you were goin’."
"I know, I'm telling you now."
You make yourself look up and instantly see that his jaw’s tight.
"I'm okay. It's not…it's not that kind of thing. I'm not sick or hurt. I'm..." You exhale. "I'm going through the change of life. It’s called perimenopause."
The word sits in the kitchen between you.
Joel says nothing. He looks at you with that particular expression that means he’s processing and isn’t ready to respond yet. You’ve learned over the years not to rush that expression because rushing it gets you something defensive and half-formed rather than whatever he actually thinks.
"It's the…it's the hormonal transition before menopause," you say, because the silence is getting heavy and you need to keep talking or you’re going to lose your nerve. "The hot flashes I've been having, those are a symptom. The…the sleep stuff, being tired, the moods…"
You swallow.
"The...the not wanting to. The difficulty with…with being dry when we…when we try."
The last part costs you something and you haven’t known how much until you say it, until the warmth hits your face and you realise you’re actually blushing, actually mortified in a way you haven’t been in front of this man in years.
Joel sets his mug on the counter and stays quiet for so long that you’ve started to construct catastrophic narratives – he's disgusted, he's disappointed, he's realising he's stuck with someone whose body is doing something irreversible and unglamorous and…
"Why didn't you tell me?" he says, his voice low.
"Because I didn't know what was wrong," you reply, "not exactly. Not until I saw Dr Vee. And before that I just thought…" You press your lips together. "I thought I was losing something. Or becoming… less. I don't know. It's embarrassing, Joel. It's embarrassing to not want someone you love, and not know why, and not be able to explain it to them. It's embarrassing to…"
Your voice threatens to fracture, and you hold it level.
"To be lying there while someone you love tries and feeling nothing and not knowing if it's ever going to come back."
Joel looks at you for a long moment. Then he crosses the kitchen, takes the mug out of your hands and sets it next to his, his hands coming to rest on either side of your face, large and warm.
"Look at me," he says and you raise your eyes to meet his. "You thought I'd…what, think less of you?"
You don’t answer, because yes – that is precisely what you thought, and saying it out loud to his face feels even more foolish than it seemed in the privacy of your own catastrophising.
"Hey." His thumb moves along your cheekbone. "I've been worried sick for weeks. I didn't know if I'd…if I'd done somethin’ or said somethin' wrong. I didn't know if you were tired of me, I didn't know if there was somethin’ wrong and you weren't tellin’ me…I've been lyin’ next to you not knowin’ what was wrong, watchin’ you pull away and not…not known how to ask without makin’ it worse."
Oh.
You haven’t thought of that. You’ve been so consumed by your own experience of this thing – the confusion of it, the embarrassment, the quietly devastating sense of your own body becoming unreliable – that you haven’t fully reckoned with what it looks like from the other side of the bed.
Joel, who loves you, can’t fix things, can’t explain things and has been waking up next to a wall he doesn’t know how to scale.
"I thought you knew it wasn't you," you say.
"How was I supposed to know that?"
You close your eyes briefly, because he’s being entirely fair.
"I'm sorry," you say. "I should've…I should've said something earlier. I was ashamed and I didn't…"
"Don't." His forehead comes down to rest against yours. "Don't apologise. I'm not…I'm not angry with you, baby, I just." He exhales. "I just needed to know."
You stand there, and something you've been carrying for months loosens in your chest. Not entirely, but enough that you can breathe differently.
"Dr Vee gave me some things," you say. "Botanical stuff, and some…some preparations that are supposed to help with the physical symptoms. She said it's normal. She was very clear about it being a normal process."
"Good."
"It doesn't mean the wanting is gone forever. She said for a lot of women it adjusts and evens out eventually. Just the transition is…a lot.”
"Okay." He pulls back enough to look at you, his eyes moving over your face in the way they do when he’s committing something to memory or making a decision.
"What do you need?"
The simplicity of the question almost undoes you.
What do you need. Not, what should we do about this or how do we fix it. Just, what do you need.
"I need you not to make me feel like something's broken," you say. "I need you to…I need it to be okay when I can't. And I need you to not…not pull away entirely, just because I've been different. I still need you close, Joel. I still need to feel like you…like you still want to be close to me, even when it can't go anywhere."
Joel holds your face in his hands for a moment longer, and you watch him work through something – that interior processing, the careful assembly of a response that’s actually true rather than just immediately comforting.
"I pulled back because I didn't want to push," he says finally, “not because I didn't want you. Those two things ain’t the same."
"I know that now. I think I just needed to hear it."
He makes a low sound that isn’t quite a word and pulls you into him, one hand flat against the back of your head, your face against his shoulder, and you stand there letting him hold you with the particular solidity he has and feel, for the first time in months, like you’re in the right coordinates. Like you've been slightly displaced and have finally found your way back to exactly where you’re supposed to be standing.
"We're gonna figure it out," he says into your hair. Not it'll be fine, not don't worry, but rather the specific practical commitment of we are going to work this problem together, which is the most Joel Miller expression of love you can imagine, and it breaks something loose in your chest that you haven’t realised was still clenched.
****
The first week after the conversation is its own kind of awkward.
You've spent so long not saying things that having said them leaves you both slightly exposed and uncertain how to proceed. The way you feel after finally lancing something – relieved but also raw and tentative about what comes next.
Joel’s careful in a new way now, a way that’s warmer than the previous caution. He touches you more in the small ways – his hand at the small of your back when you pass in the kitchen, the deliberate way he drops a kiss to the top of your head when you’re reading by the fire. Not loaded touches, not leading anywhere, just present. I'm here. You're here. This is still us.
You keep meaning to use the preparations Dr Vee’s given you and keep finding reasons to put it off. They sit in the small box on your side of the dresser, and you regard them each morning with the complex emotional relationship one develops with necessary but humbling things.
On a Thursday evening, almost two weeks after the kitchen conversation, Joel picks the box up off the dresser and you look up from where you’re taking off your boots to see him turning it over in his hands with an expression you can’t immediately read.
"This what she gave you?"
"Yes."
He opens it and looks at the small, stoppered bottle of vitamin E oil, the tin of coconut oil and the cloth packet of dried black cohosh with Dr Vee’s careful handwritten label. He examines each one with the focused attention he gives to anything mechanical or practical, the same way he assesses a weapon's condition or a vehicle's engine problem – with genuine interest and no apparent judgment.
He sets the black cohosh aside and holds up the bottle. "This one?"
"And the tin."
He nods slowly, sets them both on the nightstand and sets the box on the dresser.
"Okay.”
That’s it – okay. No commentary, no visible awkwardness, no performance of being fine with something he’s secretly weird about. It’s such a profoundly Joel response that you find yourself laughing and he glances over at you.
"What?"
"Nothing. Just…you."
The corner of his mouth moves. "Me?"
"The way you just…filed it."
"What else was I gonna do?"
You don’t have an answer for that, so you finish pulling your boots off, set them on the floor, look at him and feel, quietly and simply, that you love him very much.
****
The hot flashes continue. The black cohosh helps by blunting the worst of them and taking the edge off the frequency. You still wake sometimes in the small hours with that internal furnace blast, but more often now Joel’s awake too, or half-awake, and he simply folds the blanket back without a word, and you lie there in the cool air until it passes. He waits until, eventually, you're cold again and he pulls it back and then settles back into sleep.
He starts leaving the window cracked without being asked. One night you wake up to find it’s cracked, and it always is after that.
The mood swings are harder to navigate cleanly. There are evenings where something small catches at you and becomes enormous without your full participation.
Some hormonal amplifier turning minor friction into something that feels catastrophic. You hear yourself say something sharper than you intend, see his jaw tighten and know he’s choosing to absorb it rather than return it.
Afterward, when the chemical weather has shifted and you feel like yourself again, you apologise and tell him it’s not about him, and he says he knows and means it, you think. Or is at least working on meaning it.
Once he says, almost under his breath: "This what it was like livin' with me for years?"
You look at him.
"The moods," he says. "The not knowin' where it's comin' from."
He’s mapping it onto something he recognises, offering a kind of symmetry that you haven’t expected. A quiet, private acknowledgment that the territory of being difficult and not fully choosing it is not unfamiliar to him.
"Probably something like that," you say carefully.
He nods once, looking at some middle distance. Then he goes back to whatever he’s been doing, the conversation over, and it’s been one of the most unexpectedly intimate exchanges you can remember.
****
It’s a Saturday night in late January, the cold absolute outside, the woodstove doing its best, when things shift.
You haven’t planned it. That’s the thing about desire – when it finally finds its way back through the fog and the flatness, it doesn’t arrive with ceremony. It arrives the way returning feeling arrives in a limb that's been asleep – tingling, slightly shocking and suddenly present.
Joel’s at the table reading one of the battered paperbacks from the community library, and you’re watching him from across the room with a cup of cooling tea and registering, with something like surprised relief, that you want him.
Not a polite wanting, not a decided wanting, not I should try. Just clean simple want, easy as breathing, the old thing returning like a word you've forgotten you know.
He looks up and finds you watching.
"What?”
"Nothing."
He holds your gaze for a moment, and you see him recognise something in your expression, something he hasn’t seen in a while. The particular quality of his attention shifts and he closes the book.
In the bedroom, with the lamp turned low and the cold pressing at the windows, you let him relearn you slowly. Not rushing, not the practiced ease of a routine you can both do without thinking – this is more careful than that, more deliberate, His hands move over you with the genuine attention you remember from the first year and also entirely unlike it because you’re not who you were in the first year, neither is he and the difference isn’t loss.
He finds the oil on the nightstand and uses it without comment or making it a thing, with the same practical and focused care he brings to anything that needs doing right. His hands are warm and unhurried, and you feel the tight-held embarrassment you've been carrying for months release its grip. Because there’s nothing here to be ashamed of, nothing clinical or distancing about it when done like this, in the low light with his eyes on your face and his attention fully and specifically yours.
"Okay?" he asks.
"Yes," you say, genuinely meaning it.
"Tell me if it's not."
"I will."
He believes you. That’s the thing – he believes you now, because you’ve finally told him the truth about what’s happening in your body, have let him into the actual territory instead of leaving him to navigate it blind. The trust moves in both directions, and it makes everything different.
It’s slower than it used to be. Some things are different, some sensations subtly altered, some angles better than others. You tell him what you need as you find it and he adjusts without question, without ego in it, which is its own language, its own kind of devotion.
Afterward you lie with your head on his chest in the dark and his arm around you. The woodstove ticks and outside the wind moves and you feel quiet in a way you haven’t felt in months.
His hand moves up and down your back in a slow unconscious rhythm.
"Still with me?" he says. He sometimes asks that, after. It’s never entirely lost the meaning it acquired in the first year – are you here, are we here, is this still the thing we're building?
"Still with you," you reply.
"Good."
You press your lips to his collarbone and think about what Dr Vee said. You’re not losing but rather becoming – which is harder to hold in the mind but feels, in this moment, truer.
"It might not always…"
"I know."
"Some nights it might still be…"
"I know." His arm tightens slightly. "And some nights you'll wake up at two in the mornin’ like you're on fire and I'll open the window and we'll lie there 'til it passes. And some mornin’s you won't be able to find a word you're lookin’ for, and some days the smallest thing's gonna catch you sideways, and I'll figure out which days those are and give you a wider berth."
He pauses.
"And I'll still be here."
You lift your head to look at him, his eyes finding yours with the ease of long familiarity.
"You rehearse that?"
"Little bit."
You laugh – really laugh, the kind that comes from somewhere warm and involuntary – and feel him smile against the top of your head, that rare private smile he only wears when no one’s watching, which means he’s wearing it for you.
"Joel."
"Mm?"
"Thank you for being…" You stop and try again. "For not making it smaller than it is or bigger than it is. Just…"
"Just what it is," he finishes.
"Yeah."
He pulls you back down against his chest. "Get some sleep while you can."
You close your eyes and realise that you don’t feel like something’s ending. Rather you feel, in the particular stillness of this room and those arms and this quiet dark, like something’s continuing – not unchanged, not unmarked, but continuous.
Still yours. Still his. Complicated and warm and stubbornly, essentially here.
Plot summary: In 1870s Texas, Joel Miller loses his wife and son in childbirth, leaving him to raise his five year old daughter Sarah alone. Faced with losing her to his wife's grieving parents, or being forced into marrying her younger sister, he turns to you - the town's thirty-something spinster - and asks for your hand in a marriage of convenience.
Chapter summary: Joel’s worried about you falling pregnant - until he isn’t.
Warnings: 18+only 😛
A/N: I’m off on holiday next week so the next chapter will realistically not be posted until Friday 17th July.
Masterlist
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For some reason, you thought that would be it. You thought that your virginity having been handed over and Doc Cooper having told you of the decision of the town council, you would spend the remainder of Joel’s time back at the ranch playing at normality – undertaking your chores and mothering Sarah whilst he worked, all of you pretending that Monday evening doesn’t have to come.
You thought wrong.
You haven’t realised how hungry a taste of something can make a person. All morning, you’ve watched Joel move around the house like you always do and yet, you see him now in a completely different way. You see the sweat beading on his brow, the parting of his lips, the sounds coming from his throat and every single image undoes you every time. You have to step out of the room to fan your face or wipe your brow because it cannot be proper for a woman – married or otherwise – to be in such a constant state of arousal.
You can feel it between your thighs – the wetness that makes you press them together and breathe out heavily through your nose to try and calm yourself. And Joel seems oblivious to the effect he’s having on you, his hand resting briefly at your back as he passes you in the kitchen, or his boot nudging yours under the table, or his gaze slipping down from your eyes to your mouth and back again like he’s memorising the route.
By mid-afternoon, you can’t take it any longer.
Sarah goes down for a nap, worn out by the long bright morning and the heat of the noon dinner, and she sleeps slow and deep behind the closed door of her room down the hall with the curtains drawn and the little oscillating breath of her sleep the only sound in there.
Tomás and the other hands are taking shelter from the fierce heat, the world around the house quiet and still.
But you’re not still. There’s no way you can be, not sat astride your husband in the bedroom chair, all items of clothing long since lost to the floorboards, the heavy length of him deep inside you, your hips rising and falling slowly against his, your head tossed back, breasts thrust towards his waiting mouth.
“Yes…” you gasp, “yes, yes, yes…”
His lips close over one stiff peak and suckle greedily, the warmth of his mouth against your soft flesh only adding to the heat surging through your entire body.
“Yes Joel…yes…”
He pulls back, breath ragged, hands sliding upwards from your hips across the span of your back, holding you steady, encouraging you as your rise and fall grows more urgent.
“You look beautiful darlin’,” he murmurs. “You like that? Tell me you like it.”
“I like it…Joel…it’s…”
“Can’t get enough, can you?” A warm chuckle escapes his throat. “Well, I ain’t complainin’ darlin’. I got the best seat in the house right here – literally – and goddamn if I don’t love watchin’ you like this.”
A small high helpless sound tears out of your throat as you move harder against him.
“Lord Christ…” he says softly and you open your sweat filled eyes to see him looking at the place where you meet. Following his gaze, you watch transfixed as your body takes him. “See that?” he looks up at you. “See how good you take me, darlin’, how good we fit together?”
You don’t have words. You can only moan as he slowly licks the pad of one thumb across his tongue then presses it gently, but firmly, against your clitoris, making your entire body jerk.
“That’s it darlin’,” you hear him murmur as you close your eyes again. “Lemme make you feel good. You just keep doin’ what you’re doin’ – just like that.”
“Joel…” You grip onto his shoulders, bowing your head forwards to rest against his. “Joel, it’s…it’s….”
“I know, just you keep goin’. Do what feels good, darlin’.”
“You feel good,” you breathe. “You feel good…oh God…” You throw your head back again as his thumb circles your clitoris faster. “I never knew…never knew…”
“Well, you know now.”
"I can’t…can’t think of anything…there’s nothing else, Joel. There’s nothing in the world but you inside me. I can’t…oh…"
Before you realise what’s happening, you feel him rise with you still wrapped around him, the hot hard length of him still buried deep inside, and your legs wind tight around the curve of his hips, your arms going around his neck.
He turns and carries you three steps to the wall, your back hitting it gently, causing you to gasp. His hands slide slowly down to the curve of your backside, gripping, lifting and pinning you with his chest against yours as he drives in.
He fucks you slow and hard and deep – there are no other words to describe it – and, once more, you can’t think.
There is nothing but the hot hard length of him driving slow and deep and full into you and the high helpless desperate sounds tearing slow out of your throat that you don’t bother to keep quiet at all.
"Harder, Joel…please, harder…"
You don’t even know where such a request has come from. All you know is that you need more.
The slow rocking of hips breaks into something harder and faster as beads of sweat roll down his throat. The heavy salt smell of you both hangs thick as your heels catch at the curve of his backside and draw him harder against you with every stroke. Your nails score against his back and he groans into your mouth as his pace quickens.
You feel the heat building in your body, unshakable and unstoppable. “Joel, I’m…”
You don’t have time to form any other words as release crashes over you, and you wail against his throat as your body clenches around him. Seconds later – mere seconds – you feel it build again and you moan helplessly, grateful that he’s bearing your weight, for you know you couldn’t bear it yourself.
His hips begin to lose their careful rhythm at last, the hammering coming slow and rough and desperate now, his control fraying, and you understand through the fog of your own pleasure that he’s close.
"I have to…” he gasps. “I…”
He begins to draw back, his hands at the curve of your backside loosening to lower you, the hot hard length of him beginning to slip from within you, and a sound of displeasure tears out of your throat.
"No!"
He stills. “Darlin’…”
"Please Joel…please don’t pull out, please. I want to feel you. I need to feel you. Stay inside me. Finish inside me, please.”
You expect an argument. You expect words of fear and trepidation and the ghost of Tess. You expect the careful man who initially lost his head and then rediscovered it when you reminded him of the consequences of a man finishing inside his wife.
But you don’t get the argument, or the words. Instead, he simply groans your name, grips your backside harder and drives you back down onto him, sheathing himself to the hilt again and causing you to cry out.
“Like this?" he growls softly, hips snapping against yours.
"Yes… "
"You want me to finish inside you darlin’?"
"Yes, please,” you moan, gripping him tighter. “Please Joel…”
"You want me to fill you up, darlin’? You want me to put it deep inside you? You want it so deep it takes?"
For a brief moment, your brain can’t compute what he’s just said, but your body and mouth react as though it’s the only language they understand. "Yes…yes…!"
“The thought of it,” he gasps as he drives harder. “The thought of you round with my child, the thought of you carryin’…"
He trails off to groan loudly.
"You want my baby?”
“Yes…” you gasp helplessly.
“I’m gonna fill you up, darlin’. I’m gonna put it so deep inside you…"
"Yes Joel, please…fill me…I’m close again…"
There’s no time for you to feel scandalised by your own words, because the third release is coming hard.
"That's it, darlin’,” he pants, reaching between you once more and circling you firmly. “Finish for me. Finish around me and let me fill you up. Lemme put it deep inside you.”
You groan as you clench around him, milking him slow and hard and desperate the way he’s begged and a low broken, wrecked sound tears from his throat as he falters and stills deep, driving one last full stroke to the hilt and holding there.
“I'm…I'm fillin’ you…"
He gasps as he spills hot and wet deep inside you and your legs wind tight around the curve of his hips and hold him through every pulse.
"That's it, darlin’," he breathes against your throat. "That's it. So deep. So deep inside you.”
He holds you against him, tilting you so the hot warmth of him pools inside you, his beard scraping against your throat, breath slowing with every shuddering pulse.
“Maybe’s I…I shouldn’t have said it like that,” he says finally.
“Said what?” you ask, your heart still thundering in your chest.
“Bout fillin’ you.” He lets out a soft laugh, almost embarrassed. “Ain’t the most lovin’ words in the world. Guess there’s a hundred better ways to say it.”
You nuzzle his neck with your nose and smile against his skin. “I don’t mind. I liked it.”
Gently, he pulls back and looks at you, brows drawn together. “You liked it?” You nod. “You liked it when I talked ‘bout fillin’ you up?”
“Yes.”
A smile breaks across his face, and he gently slides himself from inside you, both of you hissing at the sensation, before cupping your face with his hands and looking at you squarely.
“Are you tellin’ me, Mrs Miller, that you like…dirty talk?”
You feel a flush creep up your neck. “I don’t know. Is…is that sort of thing considered…dirty talk?”
“S’pose it is, in a way.”
“Then I suppose, in a way, the answer is yes.”
He laughs and shakes his head, eyes wandering over your face as though he’s marvelling at every bit of you. “I bet a year ago you never imagined yourself ever standin’ naked in front of a man who’s been givin’ you dirty talk ‘bout fillin’ you with his child.”
You smile softly, feeling tears prick at the corners of your eyes. “A year ago, I never thought I’d be this happy. I suppose the dirty talk is simply an added bonus.”
He watches you carefully for a moment, then nods. “Well, I’m gonna keep makin’ you happy, darlin’ – dirty talk and all.”
****
The evening’s cooled by the time Maria comes to the house bearing an apple pie and something that smells suspiciously like roasted chicken.
The white heat of the long afternoon has broken into the long slow gold of the early evening, and a soft breeze has thankfully come up at last from the south. Sarah wakes from her nap rosy and rumpled and starving, and Joel takes her out to Tess’s garden to water the flowers before supper. You want to give them that time together, so you stood at the kitchen table in a fresh print dress with your hair pinned up neat, shelling the last of the early peas into a bowl.
Maria lets herself in through the open kitchen door.
"Evening, Señora."
"Come in,” you greet her warmly. “There's coffee on, or buttermilk if you'd rather – it's still cool from the well."
"Buttermilk would be lovely, thank you."
She places her wares down and pours herself a glass of the cool buttermilk from the crock, then leans against the sideboard, and watches you work for a long moment without speaking.
You feel it, but you keep your eyes on the peas, as a warm flush begins to climb your throat.
"What is it, Maria?"
"Nothing."
She sips at the buttermilk, her eyes not moving from your face.
"Maria."
"It is nothing,” she insists, the corner of her mouth pulling. "Only…you look well.”
The flush climbs slow higher, but you keep your eyes on the peas and split another pod into the bowl.
"It's the breeze," you reply. "It's a mercy after the heat of the day."
"Mm. You look happy. Happier than I have seen you in a long time, even with the legal problems facing Don Joel."
The words come out quiet and plain and you still with a pea pod half-split in your fingers above the bowl, the flush blooming now across your entire face.
You don't trust your voice for a long moment, so you split the last of the pea pods, gather the empty hulls into your apron, and carry the bowl to the sink. Only then do you turn and look at her.
"I am happy, Maria," you reply. “As you say, there are still challenges ahead. But with Doc Cooper and the town council on Joel’s side and Mr Oliver in our corner, I’m feeling hopeful about all this business with the Reverend and…”
You break off at the look at her face and know, with certainty, that those things are not what she’s referring to.
"I'm glad of it," she says.
"We…Joel and I…we’ve talked a lot since he came home, about a great many things and…well, things are different now. Better.”
“Mm,” she says again, putting her glass down slowly. “He is touching you.”
“I…” you feel the flush deepen, your gaze drawn away from hers and down to the folds of your apron. “I…yes.”
“I am glad of it. It was a great concern to you when we spoke before and I told you – give him time. I have seen how Don Joel has used that time. Tomás and I have both seen how he looks at you and how he speaks of you. We have both seen the change.”
You look up and meet her gaze, watching as she nods slowly. She knows the look of a woman who has finally, after a long, starved period, been thoroughly and gladly loved.
“Yes,” you say softly. “There has been a change for the better and I’m…I’m glad of it.”
Stepping towards you, Maria rests her hands gently on your upper arms and squeezes. “You do not have to worry. His love for you is as great as it was for her – I can tell. And the fact that you have made space for her, makes all the difference.”
She glances outside to where, from the far window, you can see Joel and Sarah kneeling in front of the larkspur.
"I'll leave you to your supper. That little girl will eat the legs off the table when she gets in.”
"Maria…thank you. For your counsel and for being kind to me.”
"You would have managed without it,” she nods. “You're stronger than you know. You came here to marry a grieving man with a motherless child and a wall of grief around him a mile high, and you stayed, and you waited him out, and you won him. But you're welcome, all the same. Get some food in that man tonight and…whatever you’re doing, keep on doing it. It suits you."
She steps back out into the golden evening and crosses the yard, raising her hand to Joel and Sarah as she goes. Minutes later, Sarah comes tumbling into the house chattering brightly, her braids bouncing. Joel comes in behind her with the lazy crooked smile easy on his face, his shirtsleeves rolled and his eyes finding yours at once. The look that passes between you in the evening light is the look of two people who share a great many things now that no one else in the world knows.
Well, except perhaps Maria.
The flush blooms across your face again and you turn back to the peas to hide it, busying yourself with ensuring that the table is properly set and that everyone has what they need. When you set Joel’s plate in front of him, he thanks you, his hand coming up from behind and resting on your backside through your dress, only succeeding in making the flush worse.
Sarah’s chatter continues through the meal, leaving you dizzy at how quickly and ably she can leap from one topic to another with no apparent connection. You’ve almost finished eating when she puts her fork down and nods solemnly.
"I think I’d like a baby sister."
The kitchen goes quiet. You don’t dare look at Joel, instead keeping your eyes on your plate. The whole evening somehow holds its breath around the kitchen table, and across from you Joel goes very still with his fork halfway to his mouth.
"Or a brother. I don't mind which.”
She looks up, gaze shifting between the two of you.
"So, I think we should get one. A baby. I could help.”
She returns to her meat, seemingly satisfied, as though she’s settled the whole matter with her words,
Across the table, Joel sets his fork down against his plate and you make yourself look up at him. His eyes are already on you, his smile quiet and warm, the look passing between you across the table holding a great many things.
Sarah scrapes the last of her gravy off her plate.
"Can we?" she asks, not looking up. "Can we get a baby?"
"Babies aren't quite something you get just like that, my love,” you say quietly. “They come…they come when the time is right, and when a Ma and Pa are ready for them. They can't be hurried."
Sarah considers this.
"When will the time be right?"
You don’t look at Joel because you can feel the flush blooming again across your face and hear his words from when he was buried deep inside you in your ear.
"I don't rightly know. Someday, maybe, if we're lucky and God’s willing.”
"I'll pray for it," Sarah announces slow, with a child’s easy, total confidence. "I'll pray real hard and I know God’ll listen."
She slides down off her chair and carries her plate to the sink.
"May I be excused?”
“Of course, babygirl,” Joel says, his voice coming out rough and thick. “Put your boots on if you’re goin’ back outside.”
She tears off to find her boots, chattering to herself about babies, the screen door banging behind her as she leaves, and you and Joel finally look at one another again.
For a moment neither of you speak, then he laughs, soft and gentle and reaches across the table for your hand.
“Did you say anythin’ to her ‘bout babies?”
“No, of course not,” you reply. “I wouldn’t. Did you?”
"No, but she’s clearly been thinkin’ on it. Our almost six-year-old daughter, plannin’ our family for us.” He shakes his head. "Out of the mouths of babes."
"Out of the mouths of babes," you agree, squeezing his hand.
"Someday," he says quietly.
"Someday," you nod, holding his gaze, watching as his eyes shift from yours to your mouth and back again. “Joel Miller…”
“What?” he grins. “Can’t a man look at his wife and admire her of an evenin’?”
“I feel as though you may be admiring me with nefarious purpose.”
“Well, if you call thinkin’ bout bendin’ you over this table and losin’ myself inside you again nefarious then I’m guilty as charged, darlin’. Of that, if not of anythin’ else.”
You can’t help but laugh, and out across the yard, in the gold of the evening, Sarah kneels in front of her mother’s garden, telling her all about the baby sister or brother she’s going to pray for. And the breeze carries it in through the open kitchen windows, Joel's fingers tightening warm around yours across the table, and neither of you let go.
Plot summary: In 1870s Texas, Joel Miller loses his wife and son in childbirth, leaving him to raise his five year old daughter Sarah alone. Faced with losing her to his wife's grieving parents, or being forced into marrying her younger sister, he turns to you - the town's thirty-something spinster - and asks for your hand in a marriage of convenience.
Chapter summary: Joel’s worried about you falling pregnant - until he isn’t.
Warnings: 18+only 😛
A/N: I’m off on holiday next week so the next chapter will realistically not be posted until Friday 17th July.
Masterlist
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For some reason, you thought that would be it. You thought that your virginity having been handed over and Doc Cooper having told you of the decision of the town council, you would spend the remainder of Joel’s time back at the ranch playing at normality – undertaking your chores and mothering Sarah whilst he worked, all of you pretending that Monday evening doesn’t have to come.
You thought wrong.
You haven’t realised how hungry a taste of something can make a person. All morning, you’ve watched Joel move around the house like you always do and yet, you see him now in a completely different way. You see the sweat beading on his brow, the parting of his lips, the sounds coming from his throat and every single image undoes you every time. You have to step out of the room to fan your face or wipe your brow because it cannot be proper for a woman – married or otherwise – to be in such a constant state of arousal.
You can feel it between your thighs – the wetness that makes you press them together and breathe out heavily through your nose to try and calm yourself. And Joel seems oblivious to the effect he’s having on you, his hand resting briefly at your back as he passes you in the kitchen, or his boot nudging yours under the table, or his gaze slipping down from your eyes to your mouth and back again like he’s memorising the route.
By mid-afternoon, you can’t take it any longer.
Sarah goes down for a nap, worn out by the long bright morning and the heat of the noon dinner, and she sleeps slow and deep behind the closed door of her room down the hall with the curtains drawn and the little oscillating breath of her sleep the only sound in there.
Tomás and the other hands are taking shelter from the fierce heat, the world around the house quiet and still.
But you’re not still. There’s no way you can be, not sat astride your husband in the bedroom chair, all items of clothing long since lost to the floorboards, the heavy length of him deep inside you, your hips rising and falling slowly against his, your head tossed back, breasts thrust towards his waiting mouth.
“Yes…” you gasp, “yes, yes, yes…”
His lips close over one stiff peak and suckle greedily, the warmth of his mouth against your soft flesh only adding to the heat surging through your entire body.
“Yes Joel…yes…”
He pulls back, breath ragged, hands sliding upwards from your hips across the span of your back, holding you steady, encouraging you as your rise and fall grows more urgent.
“You look beautiful darlin’,” he murmurs. “You like that? Tell me you like it.”
“I like it…Joel…it’s…”
“Can’t get enough, can you?” A warm chuckle escapes his throat. “Well, I ain’t complainin’ darlin’. I got the best seat in the house right here – literally – and goddamn if I don’t love watchin’ you like this.”
A small high helpless sound tears out of your throat as you move harder against him.
“Lord Christ…” he says softly and you open your sweat filled eyes to see him looking at the place where you meet. Following his gaze, you watch transfixed as your body takes him. “See that?” he looks up at you. “See how good you take me, darlin’, how good we fit together?”
You don’t have words. You can only moan as he slowly licks the pad of one thumb across his tongue then presses it gently, but firmly, against your clitoris, making your entire body jerk.
“That’s it darlin’,” you hear him murmur as you close your eyes again. “Lemme make you feel good. You just keep doin’ what you’re doin’ – just like that.”
“Joel…” You grip onto his shoulders, bowing your head forwards to rest against his. “Joel, it’s…it’s….”
“I know, just you keep goin’. Do what feels good, darlin’.”
“You feel good,” you breathe. “You feel good…oh God…” You throw your head back again as his thumb circles your clitoris faster. “I never knew…never knew…”
“Well, you know now.”
"I can’t…can’t think of anything…there’s nothing else, Joel. There’s nothing in the world but you inside me. I can’t…oh…"
Before you realise what’s happening, you feel him rise with you still wrapped around him, the hot hard length of him still buried deep inside, and your legs wind tight around the curve of his hips, your arms going around his neck.
He turns and carries you three steps to the wall, your back hitting it gently, causing you to gasp. His hands slide slowly down to the curve of your backside, gripping, lifting and pinning you with his chest against yours as he drives in.
He fucks you slow and hard and deep – there are no other words to describe it – and, once more, you can’t think.
There is nothing but the hot hard length of him driving slow and deep and full into you and the high helpless desperate sounds tearing slow out of your throat that you don’t bother to keep quiet at all.
"Harder, Joel…please, harder…"
You don’t even know where such a request has come from. All you know is that you need more.
The slow rocking of hips breaks into something harder and faster as beads of sweat roll down his throat. The heavy salt smell of you both hangs thick as your heels catch at the curve of his backside and draw him harder against you with every stroke. Your nails score against his back and he groans into your mouth as his pace quickens.
You feel the heat building in your body, unshakable and unstoppable. “Joel, I’m…”
You don’t have time to form any other words as release crashes over you, and you wail against his throat as your body clenches around him. Seconds later – mere seconds – you feel it build again and you moan helplessly, grateful that he’s bearing your weight, for you know you couldn’t bear it yourself.
His hips begin to lose their careful rhythm at last, the hammering coming slow and rough and desperate now, his control fraying, and you understand through the fog of your own pleasure that he’s close.
"I have to…” he gasps. “I…”
He begins to draw back, his hands at the curve of your backside loosening to lower you, the hot hard length of him beginning to slip from within you, and a sound of displeasure tears out of your throat.
"No!"
He stills. “Darlin’…”
"Please Joel…please don’t pull out, please. I want to feel you. I need to feel you. Stay inside me. Finish inside me, please.”
You expect an argument. You expect words of fear and trepidation and the ghost of Tess. You expect the careful man who initially lost his head and then rediscovered it when you reminded him of the consequences of a man finishing inside his wife.
But you don’t get the argument, or the words. Instead, he simply groans your name, grips your backside harder and drives you back down onto him, sheathing himself to the hilt again and causing you to cry out.
“Like this?" he growls softly, hips snapping against yours.
"Yes… "
"You want me to finish inside you darlin’?"
"Yes, please,” you moan, gripping him tighter. “Please Joel…”
"You want me to fill you up, darlin’? You want me to put it deep inside you? You want it so deep it takes?"
For a brief moment, your brain can’t compute what he’s just said, but your body and mouth react as though it’s the only language they understand. "Yes…yes…!"
“The thought of it,” he gasps as he drives harder. “The thought of you round with my child, the thought of you carryin’…"
He trails off to groan loudly.
"You want my baby?”
“Yes…” you gasp helplessly.
“I’m gonna fill you up, darlin’. I’m gonna put it so deep inside you…"
"Yes Joel, please…fill me…I’m close again…"
There’s no time for you to feel scandalised by your own words, because the third release is coming hard.
"That's it, darlin’,” he pants, reaching between you once more and circling you firmly. “Finish for me. Finish around me and let me fill you up. Lemme put it deep inside you.”
You groan as you clench around him, milking him slow and hard and desperate the way he’s begged and a low broken, wrecked sound tears from his throat as he falters and stills deep, driving one last full stroke to the hilt and holding there.
“I'm…I'm fillin’ you…"
He gasps as he spills hot and wet deep inside you and your legs wind tight around the curve of his hips and hold him through every pulse.
"That's it, darlin’," he breathes against your throat. "That's it. So deep. So deep inside you.”
He holds you against him, tilting you so the hot warmth of him pools inside you, his beard scraping against your throat, breath slowing with every shuddering pulse.
“Maybe’s I…I shouldn’t have said it like that,” he says finally.
“Said what?” you ask, your heart still thundering in your chest.
“Bout fillin’ you.” He lets out a soft laugh, almost embarrassed. “Ain’t the most lovin’ words in the world. Guess there’s a hundred better ways to say it.”
You nuzzle his neck with your nose and smile against his skin. “I don’t mind. I liked it.”
Gently, he pulls back and looks at you, brows drawn together. “You liked it?” You nod. “You liked it when I talked ‘bout fillin’ you up?”
“Yes.”
A smile breaks across his face, and he gently slides himself from inside you, both of you hissing at the sensation, before cupping your face with his hands and looking at you squarely.
“Are you tellin’ me, Mrs Miller, that you like…dirty talk?”
You feel a flush creep up your neck. “I don’t know. Is…is that sort of thing considered…dirty talk?”
“S’pose it is, in a way.”
“Then I suppose, in a way, the answer is yes.”
He laughs and shakes his head, eyes wandering over your face as though he’s marvelling at every bit of you. “I bet a year ago you never imagined yourself ever standin’ naked in front of a man who’s been givin’ you dirty talk ‘bout fillin’ you with his child.”
You smile softly, feeling tears prick at the corners of your eyes. “A year ago, I never thought I’d be this happy. I suppose the dirty talk is simply an added bonus.”
He watches you carefully for a moment, then nods. “Well, I’m gonna keep makin’ you happy, darlin’ – dirty talk and all.”
****
The evening’s cooled by the time Maria comes to the house bearing an apple pie and something that smells suspiciously like roasted chicken.
The white heat of the long afternoon has broken into the long slow gold of the early evening, and a soft breeze has thankfully come up at last from the south. Sarah wakes from her nap rosy and rumpled and starving, and Joel takes her out to Tess’s garden to water the flowers before supper. You want to give them that time together, so you stood at the kitchen table in a fresh print dress with your hair pinned up neat, shelling the last of the early peas into a bowl.
Maria lets herself in through the open kitchen door.
"Evening, Señora."
"Come in,” you greet her warmly. “There's coffee on, or buttermilk if you'd rather – it's still cool from the well."
"Buttermilk would be lovely, thank you."
She places her wares down and pours herself a glass of the cool buttermilk from the crock, then leans against the sideboard, and watches you work for a long moment without speaking.
You feel it, but you keep your eyes on the peas, as a warm flush begins to climb your throat.
"What is it, Maria?"
"Nothing."
She sips at the buttermilk, her eyes not moving from your face.
"Maria."
"It is nothing,” she insists, the corner of her mouth pulling. "Only…you look well.”
The flush climbs slow higher, but you keep your eyes on the peas and split another pod into the bowl.
"It's the breeze," you reply. "It's a mercy after the heat of the day."
"Mm. You look happy. Happier than I have seen you in a long time, even with the legal problems facing Don Joel."
The words come out quiet and plain and you still with a pea pod half-split in your fingers above the bowl, the flush blooming now across your entire face.
You don't trust your voice for a long moment, so you split the last of the pea pods, gather the empty hulls into your apron, and carry the bowl to the sink. Only then do you turn and look at her.
"I am happy, Maria," you reply. “As you say, there are still challenges ahead. But with Doc Cooper and the town council on Joel’s side and Mr Oliver in our corner, I’m feeling hopeful about all this business with the Reverend and…”
You break off at the look at her face and know, with certainty, that those things are not what she’s referring to.
"I'm glad of it," she says.
"We…Joel and I…we’ve talked a lot since he came home, about a great many things and…well, things are different now. Better.”
“Mm,” she says again, putting her glass down slowly. “He is touching you.”
“I…” you feel the flush deepen, your gaze drawn away from hers and down to the folds of your apron. “I…yes.”
“I am glad of it. It was a great concern to you when we spoke before and I told you – give him time. I have seen how Don Joel has used that time. Tomás and I have both seen how he looks at you and how he speaks of you. We have both seen the change.”
You look up and meet her gaze, watching as she nods slowly. She knows the look of a woman who has finally, after a long, starved period, been thoroughly and gladly loved.
“Yes,” you say softly. “There has been a change for the better and I’m…I’m glad of it.”
Stepping towards you, Maria rests her hands gently on your upper arms and squeezes. “You do not have to worry. His love for you is as great as it was for her – I can tell. And the fact that you have made space for her, makes all the difference.”
She glances outside to where, from the far window, you can see Joel and Sarah kneeling in front of the larkspur.
"I'll leave you to your supper. That little girl will eat the legs off the table when she gets in.”
"Maria…thank you. For your counsel and for being kind to me.”
"You would have managed without it,” she nods. “You're stronger than you know. You came here to marry a grieving man with a motherless child and a wall of grief around him a mile high, and you stayed, and you waited him out, and you won him. But you're welcome, all the same. Get some food in that man tonight and…whatever you’re doing, keep on doing it. It suits you."
She steps back out into the golden evening and crosses the yard, raising her hand to Joel and Sarah as she goes. Minutes later, Sarah comes tumbling into the house chattering brightly, her braids bouncing. Joel comes in behind her with the lazy crooked smile easy on his face, his shirtsleeves rolled and his eyes finding yours at once. The look that passes between you in the evening light is the look of two people who share a great many things now that no one else in the world knows.
Well, except perhaps Maria.
The flush blooms across your face again and you turn back to the peas to hide it, busying yourself with ensuring that the table is properly set and that everyone has what they need. When you set Joel’s plate in front of him, he thanks you, his hand coming up from behind and resting on your backside through your dress, only succeeding in making the flush worse.
Sarah’s chatter continues through the meal, leaving you dizzy at how quickly and ably she can leap from one topic to another with no apparent connection. You’ve almost finished eating when she puts her fork down and nods solemnly.
"I think I’d like a baby sister."
The kitchen goes quiet. You don’t dare look at Joel, instead keeping your eyes on your plate. The whole evening somehow holds its breath around the kitchen table, and across from you Joel goes very still with his fork halfway to his mouth.
"Or a brother. I don't mind which.”
She looks up, gaze shifting between the two of you.
"So, I think we should get one. A baby. I could help.”
She returns to her meat, seemingly satisfied, as though she’s settled the whole matter with her words,
Across the table, Joel sets his fork down against his plate and you make yourself look up at him. His eyes are already on you, his smile quiet and warm, the look passing between you across the table holding a great many things.
Sarah scrapes the last of her gravy off her plate.
"Can we?" she asks, not looking up. "Can we get a baby?"
"Babies aren't quite something you get just like that, my love,” you say quietly. “They come…they come when the time is right, and when a Ma and Pa are ready for them. They can't be hurried."
Sarah considers this.
"When will the time be right?"
You don’t look at Joel because you can feel the flush blooming again across your face and hear his words from when he was buried deep inside you in your ear.
"I don't rightly know. Someday, maybe, if we're lucky and God’s willing.”
"I'll pray for it," Sarah announces slow, with a child’s easy, total confidence. "I'll pray real hard and I know God’ll listen."
She slides down off her chair and carries her plate to the sink.
"May I be excused?”
“Of course, babygirl,” Joel says, his voice coming out rough and thick. “Put your boots on if you’re goin’ back outside.”
She tears off to find her boots, chattering to herself about babies, the screen door banging behind her as she leaves, and you and Joel finally look at one another again.
For a moment neither of you speak, then he laughs, soft and gentle and reaches across the table for your hand.
“Did you say anythin’ to her ‘bout babies?”
“No, of course not,” you reply. “I wouldn’t. Did you?”
"No, but she’s clearly been thinkin’ on it. Our almost six-year-old daughter, plannin’ our family for us.” He shakes his head. "Out of the mouths of babes."
"Out of the mouths of babes," you agree, squeezing his hand.
"Someday," he says quietly.
"Someday," you nod, holding his gaze, watching as his eyes shift from yours to your mouth and back again. “Joel Miller…”
“What?” he grins. “Can’t a man look at his wife and admire her of an evenin’?”
“I feel as though you may be admiring me with nefarious purpose.”
“Well, if you call thinkin’ bout bendin’ you over this table and losin’ myself inside you again nefarious then I’m guilty as charged, darlin’. Of that, if not of anythin’ else.”
You can’t help but laugh, and out across the yard, in the gold of the evening, Sarah kneels in front of her mother’s garden, telling her all about the baby sister or brother she’s going to pray for. And the breeze carries it in through the open kitchen windows, Joel's fingers tightening warm around yours across the table, and neither of you let go.
